Special issue on digital transformation

Digital transformation is now an essential factor in our day-to-day activities. It is the process of creating new or updated existing processes using digital technologies to fulfil customer expectations and to meet changing business requirements. In the business world, customer satisfaction is the primary objective of every organisation. Digital services play a vital role, as customers expect value-adding, quick and easy solutions to their problems. Digital transformation makes more data available and uses different techniques to satisfy customer expectations.

Recently, more attention is being given to digital transformation by both academic and industry experts. Digital transformation is related to the constant need for organisations to change their tactics and develop strategic plans, in order to keep pace with rapidly changing business environments brought about by customer demand and the speed of advancements in digital technology. This advocates for the alignment of business and IT strategies and is concerned with how an organisation`s business model can be redesigned using digital technologies for the enhancement of customer value propositions.

In this special issue, we include 11 papers that examine a number of aspects related to digital transformation. The opening paper in the issue (Alabdulkreem, 2021) presents a study which is related to the efficiency of machine learning algorithms in making early-stage diagnoses of depression in Arab women, using their tweets during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is to predict whether women have symptoms of depression when related to their feelings and thoughts over social media. The proposed contribution is to create a recurrent neural network (RNN) model to predict depression from tweets. The model is evaluated using 10,000 tweets extracted from 200 users, and the results obtained demonstrate its effectiveness.

The second paper (Louati & Hadoussa, 2021) studies the effect of social media use on employees’ work performance through its impact on social capital and knowledge sharing. A research model is proposed and empirically tested with an online survey of 328 working professionals who use social media in a telecommunications company – Tunisie Telecom. The results reveal that social media use in the workplace influenced social capital, which had an impact on knowledge sharing among employees in a way that led to better work performance. Implications and directions for future work are also discussed in the paper.

Mobile wallet applications are a pre-eminent area of innovation activity. Garrouch (2021) proposes a new model of technology adoption in a mobile wallet application context, which includes the provider’s reputation and profession, trust, perceived value and security. A structural model is verified based on the results of a survey of 382 users. Multi-group analysis is conducted to verify the moderating impact of the provider’s profession, and the results confirm the impact of the provider’s reputation on trust and perceived security; both are verified as antecedents of a continuance intention. The provider’s profession is also found to moderate the impact of reputation on trust. The study suggests that mobile wallet application providers focus on reputation in their communication strategy in order to build and maintain trust. In addition to the moderating role of the provider’s profession, verifying the provider’s reputation as a factor that enhances the trust and perceived security of the mobile wallet application constitutes the main originality of this paper.

Customers’ e-loyalty has become critical to a company’s survival and profitability with the recent growth in e-commerce. Developed in this context, the next paper (Ghali, 2021) aims to test the motives of e-satisfaction and e-trust, which are used to predict customers’ e-loyalty towards e-banking services. The study focuses mainly on motives such as security/privacy, responsiveness, website design and convenience. An empirical study was conducted with 237 customers of 30 retail banks in Saudi Arabia. The structural equation modelling method was used to test the research hypotheses. The findings show that both e-satisfaction and e-trust stimulate e-loyalty. These two variables are predicted by security/privacy and convenience. However, responsiveness and website design were only found to have a significant influence on e-satisfaction. This study contributes to the knowledge of determinants of e-loyalty in e-banking, and the findings provide clear directions for practitioners to build durable relationships with their e-customers by improving their trust and satisfaction regarding their e-services.

Many authorities currently use software-based risk-assessment instruments (SBRAIs) to assess individual's potential to commit a crime (e.g. terrorism or sexual assault). SBRAIs promise better, faster and more consistent decision-making than their paper-based predecessors. The underlying SBRAI classification schema is well understood, but given the potentially serious ethical consequences of misjudgements, there is a lack of understanding of how a newly introduced IT artefact, or digital transformation, affects the overall process. In the next paper, Lüthi et al. (2021) apply a value-centric lens and use value-sensitive design (VSD) to identify users’ most relevant SBRAI values, as well as the value tensions that exist between developers and users. The authors find that various value tensions, which had not been an issue prior to digitisation, occur and relate to traceability, reliability, neutrality, support and trust. These value tensions often emerge due to misunderstandings and miscommunications that are enabled by unclear classifications. Practitioners should, therefore, focus on the following four design guidelines to avoid SBRAI value tensions: constant and accessible information, transparency, isolated use anticipation and compliance with novice and expert users’ requirements.

In the globalised digital era, organisations have implemented social media as a methodology for customer relationship management (CRM). Social customer relationship management (SCRM) cultivates a new relationship by engaging customers on social media sites. Old-style CRM is being modernised into SCRM, and one of the key responsibilities in this new marketing and business environment is customer engagement (CE). In the study, Arora et al. (2021) examine how SCRM influences CE by investigating the impact of SCRM on CE and the further effect of CE on customer loyalty (CL), customer retention (CR) and customer satisfaction (CS). The research is descriptive in nature, and a self-administered questionnaire was prepared to achieve the stated objectives. Primary data were collected from a diverse group of respondents and edited and analysed with the help of statistical tools via SPSS and AMOS 18.0.

Digital transformation exposes enterprises to the need to alter business strategies and adopt technological advancements, such as artificial intelligence (AI). AI is expected to transform the future of work in fundamental ways. However, associated changes cause resistance behaviour among employees and hinder AI readiness, i.e. by lacking preparedness for implementation. The next paper (Frick et al., 2021) examines whether leadership can reduce resistance and how it contributes to the AI readiness of enterprises. Expert interviews indicate that empowering leadership, and particularly autonomy and development support, is favourable to manoeuvring AI-induced change. Nevertheless, a quantitative evaluation of the impact of empowering leadership shows a significant effect neither on resistance to change nor on AI readiness. The paper discusses how employees strive for consistency and how leaders provide stable environments. Researchers need to understand which factors are implicated in the AI readiness of employees and how leadership and resistance to change contribute to those factors. It is also suggested that practitioners comprehend which leadership attributes are fruitful for organisational alignments and how leaders can generate appropriate readiness.

Opinion mining can significantly support knowledge and decision-making. In another paper, Alamoudi and Alghamdi (2021) analyse the content of online reviews, including the text of reviews and their rankings. Restaurant reviews on the Yelp website were analysed according to two sentiment classifications: binary classification (positive and negative) and ternary classification (positive, negative and neutral). Three different types of predictive model were applied: machine learning, deep learning and a transfer learning model. The researchers also propose a new unsupervised approach to aspect-level sentiment classification based on semantic similarity, which allows their framework to leverage the powerful capacity of pre-trained language models, such as GloVe, and eliminate many of the complications associated with supervised learning models. Food, service, ambience and price are the aspects that were categorised according to their sentiment context. The study concluded that 98.30% of the maximum accuracy was obtained using the ALBERT model, and the proposed aspect extraction method achieved an accuracy of 83.04%.

Contactless payments are increasingly being used, with people waving or tapping their cards and devices at point-of-sale (POS) terminals across the world to make purchases. Although the shift to contactless payment systems was already taking place before the COVID-19 outbreak, it is essential to study payment technology and whether the current crisis has accelerated this transformation. In the next paper, Shishah and Alhelaly (2021) used an online survey to examine the experience of utilising contactless payment technology in Saudi Arabia during the COVID-19 outbreak and investigated the factors that could affect this experience. The results show that positive experiences in utilising contactless payment technology have increased since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study also shows that hygiene was the main reason for using contactless technology for payment during the Coronavirus crisis, while the security of transactions was the main concern in not using it for payments.

Another paper (Alaskar et al., 2020), which was grounded in the technology–organisation–environment (TOE) framework, identifies the main factors affecting the intention to adopt big data analytics (BDA) in supply chain management (SCM) by firms based in Saudi Arabia. This study focuses on identifying and analysing the role of competitive pressure as a contextual variable that could moderate the effects of these factors on adoption intention. A survey of 220 IT managers revealed that compatibility, relative advantage and top management support were positively perceived factors, as they foster firms’ intentions to adopt BDA in SCM. Their effects on intentions were positively moderated by competitive pressure as a contextual variable. However, BDA complexity and organisational readiness were not supported as factors influencing firms’ intentions to adopt BDA. The statistical analyses also indicated that the effects of complexity and organisational readiness on intentions were not significantly moderated by competitive pressure. This study contributes to the literature by emphasising the interaction between TOE factors, instead of considering them separately. It also offers guidance to managers who are aiming to adopt and use BDA in SCM.

In the concluding paper in this issue, Shareeda et al. (2021) evaluate the different factors that have an impact on the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) in Bahrain. Moreover, it determines the challenges and opportunities of different stakeholders who are identified in this study as consumers and automobile companies. The study deduces that consumer’s awareness and purchasing power have a significant impact on their willingness and intention to purchase EVs. However, the driving range has no significant impact on consumers’ willingness to purchase EVs. On the one hand, governmental financial incentives such as tax exemption/reduction could encourage participants to purchase EVs. On the other hand, infrastructure is a significant concern for both automobile companies and consumers. EVs will have a new market segment and will be the future of automobile industry.