Digital Transformation and HR in the Digital Era

This study focuses on the trend of digital transformation that is changing the business landscape as we know it. Starting from what creates the need for the transformation and what technological advancements enable it, we introduce the main drivers of digital transformation, including the Nexus of Forces (mobile, social networking, cloud and big data), artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, the consumers' changing behavior and hyper connectivity. After a much-needed section to distinguish between the often confused notions of digitization, digitalization and digital transformation, we delve into how a company can go about digital transformation: the obstacles it has to avoid, how it can manage the organizational shift that such a project can bring, different frameworks and approaches to follow on how to implement the transformation itself, and how digital transformation affects business models and the Business Model Canvas. In the people-related section of this study, we analyze how human resources has changed in the digital era, starting from the digital evolution of some of its historic tasks (e-recruiting, e-training, e-performance management) and then exploring the complicated relationship between data-driven management and the HR sector and how HR can survive and navigate these changes. A final section on people analytics then introduces the experimental section of the work, focused on trying to correlate employees' morale and engagement at work as reported by surveys with their behavior, tracked through the actions they performed on work computers and the company intranet. While no significant correlation was achieved, we underline why we think this topic is ripe for additional testing, and why further studies could provide more conclusive results.