The Global State of Digital Transformation Across Organisations: Evidence from a Large-Scale Survey

Abstract

Digital transformation is widely recognised as a key driver of innovation and competitiveness, yet systematic empirical insights into its implementation across organisations remain limited. Existing studies are often fragmented, based on limited samples or focused on specific sectors, technologies or organisational contexts. This paper addresses this gap by analysing the status quo of digital transformation based on 2,024 valid organisational responses collected between June 2020 and March 2026 through the Digital Transformation Assessment (DTA). The DTA is a scientifically grounded and empirically validated self-assessment instrument that conceptualises digital transformation as a holistic organisational phenomenon across seven dimensions: Corporate Strategy, Leadership and Corporate Culture, Organisation and Processes, Employees and Competences, Technology, Products and Services, and Supply Chain and Networks. The analysis combines descriptive, comparative and benchmark-oriented methods to examine maturity patterns across dimensions, items and contextual variables. Results show a globally moderate digital transformation maturity of Ø 3.12. Technology is the strongest dimension, whereas Employees and Competences is consistently the weakest dimension across regions, industries, organisational sizes and management levels. The findings suggest that the main bottleneck of digital transformation is increasingly human and organisational rather than purely technological. The paper contributes large-scale empirical evidence on digital transformation maturity and provides implications for research and managerial practice.