Chief Digital Officers as Protagonists in Digital Transformation

With the popularity of digital transformation programmes becoming widerspread, our study is motivated by a need to understand who has the responsibility for digital transformation across different types of organisations and industries. We take a specific focus on the Chief Digital Officer which has been considered the most fast growing executive role in the recent years. In particular, in this paper, we present a research in progress study that aims to examine the role of Chief Digital Officer in enabling digital transformation in traditional, pre-digital organisations, and to identify its impact on the IT department of these organisations. The empirical study is based on the qualitative approach with its main dataset deriving from a series of semi-structured interviews. The study is expected to have both theoretical and practical implications on the management of digital transformation.