Cross-language Keyword Analysis of Digital Transformation for Business

Digital transformation enjoys a growing interest from both practitioners and researchers. It is an encompassing term to describe the wide scope of the changes that are happening due to the increased use of digital technologies and comprises terms such as e-business and industry 4.0. Although the change is prominent worldwide, it is still not well defined and one might wonder if the concept is researched in the same way across the globe. For this reason, we conduct a thorough network analysis of the keyword co-occurrences in both the English and Chinese literature. We construct, compare, and analyze two conceptual networks to advance our understanding of digital transformation further and to investigate if there exists a difference between the English and Chinese literature. Furthermore, we utilize the obtained keyword networks to validate a recently proposed digital transformation framework. The results indicate that the digital transformation has a broad scope, is ill-defined, and is closely related to digitalization and industry 4.0. In English, digital transformation discusses many technologies, industries, and topics whereas the Chinese core journals mostly discuss the publishing and media industries. Finally, we present a research agenda that calls for more research in the role of society, more research in the interactions between society and business, and the usage of the right terminology.