Digital Transformation of Organizational and Management Controls—Review and Recommendations for the Future

Abstract

The digital transformation underlying the fourth industrial revolution—Industry 4.0—is making headway at an increasing pace. The way we work and live is changing fundamentally, and the opportunities that digitalization brings to our lives and the ways it reshapes our work at all levels are innumerable. This study aimed to explain how the utilization of emerging digital technologies for organizational and management controls has been studied and what kind of performance improvements can be achieved. A systematic review of the current literature was conducted to this end. The analysis revealed four main themes in the literature and future research directions to fill research gaps. The identified gaps were related to: (1) the internal and external drivers for utilizing digitalization in management and organizational controls, (2) the impacts of digitalization on management control systems, and prerequisites for using digital tools in management control, (3) the effects of digital tools in decision-making, and related challenges, and (4) digitalization’s effect on performance. Another possible future research direction would be to investigate the possibilities of specific techniques, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, business intelligence, and Internet of Things, in organizational and management control and decision-making.