Digital Kaizen: An Approach to Digital Transformation

Abstract

While digital transformation creates opportunities across all industries, many organisations and practitioners struggle to grasp what conducting digital transformation entails and seek directions for how digital transformation programs, especially large and complex ones, can be executed. In response, recent studies have offered such directions and models for guiding digital transformation and put forward suggestions for steps and phases of digital transformation, as well as drivers, enablers, and inhibitors. Many of these proposals are based on the dynamic capabilities framework as a theoretical foundation and invite more research to develop further and/or to refine existing models for digital transformation, especially investigating how dynamic capabilities contribute to digital transformation. In this case study, we explore Digital Kaizen, a systematic approach to conduct large-scale digital transformation developed and applied at our case organisation FPT Software. This approach integrates the Kaizen philosophy into digital transformation practices that lead to digital improvements and transformation of some of the company’s human resource management processes and its business model. Our analysis and our reflections on our findings lead us to propose a novel Digital Kaizen process model for digital transformation informed by the dynamic capabilities framework.