A bibliometric analysis and a scale development on the digital transformation maturity phenomenon

In order to keep up with rapid technological changes, people and businesses need to adapt to these developments and realize their digital transformation. In this context, understanding the concepts of digital transformation and digital maturity, identifying studies related to these issues in international literature and determining trends related to these issues are essential problems. The aim of this study is to perform a bibliometric analysis of the digital transformation maturity phenomenon and to develop a digital transformation maturity scale. The study first conducted a systematic literature review based on the PRISMA method of Moher et al. (2009) using the Web of Science database, focusing on the concepts of digital transformation and digital maturity. The 521 articles obtained as a result of the systematic literature review were mapped using bibliometric analysis with the Vosviewer program. This study will examine the collaborations between researchers, and citation analyses will be used to separately evaluate the scientific outputs of researchers and journals. The main limitation of these analyses is that they were conducted using only the data in the Web of Science database. Within the scope of bibliometric analysis, a total of 7 analyses were applied, including co-author analysis, co-occurrence analysis of keywords, document citation analysis, source matching analysis and co-citation analysis, cited reference, cited author, and cited source. The first study on digital transformation and digital maturity was conducted in 2006, and there has been an increase in related studies recently (127 articles in 2023; 144 articles in 2024). The co-authors with the highest link strength are Foroudi and Pantea, followed by Ritala and Paavo, Paul and Justin, and Giones and Ferran. The most cited co-authors are Broekhuizen and Thijs, Dong and John, Verhoef and Peter, and Bart and Yakov. The most frequently used keyword in international literature is "digital transformation". Along with the concept of digital maturity, other related words that have increased in the number of studies, especially recently, have been determined to be the concepts of "innovation", "performance", and "dynamic capabilities", respectively. In our analysis of citations to studies on digital maturity, the work of Verhorf (2021) stands out. Verhorf (2021) is followed by Warner (2019), Zhu (2006), Peng (2022) and Li (2020), respectively. The second part of our study was determined as the creation of the digital transformation maturity scale. A 76-item expression pool was created regarding the dimensions of culture, organization, strategy, information technologies, technology resources, customer and supply chain, which were determined to be used most frequently in digital maturity studies in the literature, and a content validity study was conducted for these expressions. As a result of the content validity, 29 items that did not provide the necessary quantitative values were removed from the study and an application was conducted on the remaining 47 items. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was applied to the application findings carried out with 330 participants, and a digital transformation maturity scale consisting of 32 items and 4 dimensions was obtained. Finally, confirmatory factor analysis was performed on the 32-item digital transformation maturity scale developed after EFA, and the construct validity of the scale was proven.