Consolidated Definition of Digital Transformation by using Text Mining

Abstract

Digital transformation has become essential for the majority of organizations, in both public and private sectors. The term "digital transformation" has been used (and misused), so frequently that it is now somewhat ambiguous. It has become imperative to give it some conceptual rigor. The objective of this study is to identify the major elements of digital transformation as well as develop a proper definition for DT in the public and private sectors. For this purpose, 56 different definitions of DT collected from the available literature were analyzed, and we found that they extracted elements from definition of DT manually. So, text mining (TF-IDF and Fp-tree) techniques are used to identify the major constituents and finally consolidate in generic DT definitions. The approach consists of five phases: 1) collecting and classifying DT definitions; 2) detecting synonyms; 3) extracting major elements (terms); 4) discussing and comparing DT elements; 5) formulating DT definitions for different business categories. An evaluation tool was also developed to assess the level of DT elements coverage in various definitions found in the literature, and, as a validation, it was applied to the formulated definitions.