Digital twins of organization: implications for organization design

Abstract

Abstract The recent rise of using digital representations for products and processes has created a movement to use ‘digital twins’ for organization design. We provide an overview of the notion of digital twin as a synchronized, real-time two-way interacting digital representation of the real-world phenomenon it is expected to replicate as a twin. The claim of a two-way causal connection between the real-world and the digital representation makes the current rhetoric about Digital Twins especially problematic. To grasp the challenges involved in Digital Twins of Organizations (DTO), we start from Digital Twins of Things (DTT) and Digital Twins of Business Processes (DTBP). We analyze and compare different kinds of digital twins using Peircean theory of semiotic relationships, which differentiate between signals, icons, and symbols. We posit that in order to fully model organizations as digital twins, an organization designer needs to model features of organizations that are not present in DTTs and DTBPs, such as agency, conflict, and emergence. Given the inevitable presence of symbolic phenomena, we speculate to what extent it is possible to move towards full DTOs, what characteristics broader DTOs need to have, and what benefits more extensive use of DTOs will offer for organization designers. We finally offer pointers towards a research agenda for DTOs that have the potential to improve organization designs and contribute to theory on organization design.