What the Paper Says: We Have Known Why Digital Transformations Fail for 30 Years.

Oludapo, S., Carroll, N., & Helfert, M. (2024). Why do so many digital transformations fail? A bibliometric analysis and future research agenda. Journal of Business Research, 174, 114528. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2024.114528

Over 80% of digital transformations fail. You already knew that. So did I. So have the researchers writing about it since 1994.

That is the uncomfortable truth at the centre of this paper. Why every DT consultant, CDO, and change lead needs to read it. Not because it solves the problem, because it forces you to confront the fact that the research has not.

What the Paper Does

Oludapo, Carroll, and Helfert analysed 120 peer-reviewed studies on DT failure published over 28 years. Their method was bibliometric: mapping what the literature says, tracing what the field keeps circling. The findings group into four failure domains: technology, innovation, management, and information systems. Leadership that cannot communicate. People who resist change. Organisations that mistake buying software for actually transforming.

Rigorous, methodologically clean. As academic contributions go, this one earns its place.

The Critique

Here is what the paper cannot escape: a bibliometric analysis studies papers, not organisations. It tells you what researchers have written about failure, not what failure feels like from inside a business living through one.

That gap matters. If the same four failure themes have appeared for three decades without improving DT success rates, either the research is not reaching decision-makers, or it is missing the point entirely. The paper gestures at this in its limitations section but never seriously sits with either possibility.

There is also a geographic blind spot. Research on culture and digital transformation consistently shows that culture shapes DT outcomes differently across regions. Yet the paper deliberately excluded non-English sources. In a global phenomenon, that is not a footnote. It skews every conclusion.

Most critically: the paper lists "people" as a failure factor and moves on. Current thinking on digital culture argues that culture is not a barrier to digital transformation. It is the transformation. Treating human resistance as a variable to manage rather than the central challenge to understand is exactly why the same themes keep reappearing.

What It Gets Right

The paper's strongest argument: the field is obsessed with studying success. When 80% fail, building your research agenda around the 20% that worked is not just incomplete. It actively misleads every practitioner trying to do better.

Overdue and I am glad it is in print.

But "develop a DT distress plan" means nothing to the programme director staring down a failing ERP rollout on Monday morning. The research needs to get inside the mess, not describe it from a distance.

What would actually change if researchers spent a year embedded inside a failing transformation instead of reading about one? Drop your answer below.