Stakeholder Management in Digital Transformation: A System of Systems Approach

Major technological advances, globalization, geo- political instability changes, and recent COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted organisations’ increased reliance on rapidly evolving technology to maintain operations and deliver products and services as seamlessly as possible. Consequently, digital transformation has emerged as a key priority for organisations to effectively adopt rapidly evolving technology. Digital transformation requires many stakeholders working together to achieve a common objective of supporting the organisation through a fundamental change. Managing the stakeholders is then a critical challenge in the process. Stakeholders often have different viewpoints, which can be a potent opportunity for tapping into their shared collective intelligence to develop new ideas and solutions. However, successfully incorporating these diverse perspectives and also preserving emergent behaviour is a demanding task since no methodology currently exists to support such integration. This paper proposes a System of Systems approach to stakeholder management in digital transformation, where each stakeholder is recognized as an individual, autonomous, decentralized, and heterogeneous system with its own set of attributes while simultaneously being part of a larger collective whole, or SoS. By considering each stakeholder as a system within a greater SoS, emergent behaviour that is created through stakeholder interaction can be fostered and reinforced. Since the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, emergence generated as part of a collective interface of relevant stakeholders enables more holistic stakeholder integration and contributes to more effective governance