A literature survey on digital transformation project success and failure factors

Abstract

The key areas of success and failure related to digital transformation (DT) have been crucial to comprehend since digital transformation, in general, gains significance in driving corporate innovation and competitiveness. The content that already exists on DT is scattered, often focused on the success stories, and often highly context-dependent. Through a systematic literature review of 45 peer-reviewed articles, published after 2015, this study seeks to address these areas of gaps. The industries that the studies embrace are varied in nature as they include manufacturing, information technology, information systems, software, logistics and the public sector (except those in healthcare, agriculture, and education). The review lists prominent factors in five domains: organizational, people, process, technical, and project-specific and builds inductively by deriving detailed sub-factors under each of the domains and extending the five-domain model by Chen and Sun (2025). The results indicate that Organization environment and employee skills, Leadership capability, and people-related factors have a comparatively high profile as an outcome of DT, and a comparatively lower profile is dedicated to the impact of technical and process-related factors. The analysis, too, demonstrates that there are different under-investigated failure factors, especially in the area of process and project-specific ones, where studies in the current state of research are already biased towards success. Limitations of the research are poor time coverage, exclusion of some contexts, and synthesis on basis of frequency. On the basis of these findings, the study suggests that the extended DT success/failure model be empirically tested and that specific research studies on digital transformation in SMEs, government agencies and other sectors that were previously not targeted should be conducted to confirm such results so as to offer evidence-based interventions to digital transformation.