Making IT happen: Exploring bottom-up and top-down digital transformation practices

The extant information systems literature has reported implications of both top-down and bottom-up approaches toward digital transformation, yet failed to reach consensus on when organizations use which approach. Such insights are becoming especially relevant now that organizations are increasingly engaged in large-scale, dynamic, and ongoing digital transformation endeavors while mainly reporting failures of such efforts due to inertia and resistance to change. To address that challenge, we explore bottom-up and top-down approaches to digital transformation from two case studies of public sector organizations (public infrastructure and military). Adopting a practice perspective, our findings elucidate two crucial categories of digital transformation practices, namely interchangeable and stationary practices. Stationary practices are enacted either top-down (enabling practices) or bottom-up (encouraging practices), while interchangeable practices move from bottom-up to top-down and vice versa (endorsing practices). We show that these practices are crucial for continuous digital transformation support. Importantly, we show that the identified practices are mutually reinforcing and represent a digital transformation continuum. Top-down or bottom-up approaches in isolation are, thus, insufficient for digital transformation endeavors.