The contribution of quality management to an organisation’s digital transformation: a qualitative study

Abstract

Embarking on the digital transformation journey has become vital in order to pursue competitive differentiation in a fast-changing business environment. Digital transformation involves leveraging modern digital technologies to radically transform products and services, processes and people and improve performance. This represents a tremendous and risky challenge for most organisations. Against this background, this article sets out to explore and understand how the quality management (QM) function contributes to an organisation’s digital transformation. An inductive qualitative research methodology involving 63 quality professionals is employed. The findings suggest that QM has a strong potential for supporting an organisation’s digitalisation initiative. The emergent conceptual framework captures the competences required by QM and outline a road map presenting opportunities for QM involvement. The study’s contribution is to develop novel and relevant insights to help organisations undertake and carry out a digital transformation.

Keywords:

• digital transformation
• quality management
• road map
• brainwriting