The impact of digitalisation on organisations: a review of the empirical literature

When organisations pervasively adopt digital technologies, a growing body of empirical research also shows how digitalisation is reshaping our business landscape in multiple aspects. However, fragmented research hampers practitioners and researchers to see the whole picture of digitalisation processes. This paper seeks to advance our understanding of organisational changes resulted from digitalisation through a systematic review of empirical studies on this topic. Analysis of 92 identified papers derives a framework with six digital technologies and 15 organisational elements. Building on this framework, we analyse the empirical studies in this topic concerning: 1) examined statistical relationships; and 2) investigative perspectives - best practice or contingency. We develop a synthesis of organisational impacts concerning each digital direction and find that research with different investigative perspectives focuses on distinct impacted organisational elements. We also discuss existing issues in the literature and provide suggestions for future research.