Phd Project Topic: From Data to Decisions: Exploring the Processes Underlying Digital Technology Driven Organizational Change

Research Background

The increasing application of digital twin (DT) technologies in organizational settings is reshaping how data-driven decision making, coordination, and problem-solving unfold in practice. While existing scholarship often conceptualizes DTs as technical artefacts that enhance operational efficiency or strategic outcomes, far less attention has been given to how these technologies reconfigure daily organizational processes, roles, and interactions. My PhD project addresses this gap by examining the performative and processual ways in which DTs transform organizational decision-making and business processes in real time.

My research seeks to uncover the micro-level mechanisms, patterns of action, and evolving organizational structures shaped through DT use. Rather than relying on variance-based explanations, this project adopts a processual lens to explain how DTs become enacted and internalized, and how this enactment recursively shapes organizational routines, knowledge flows, and ultimately the transformation of decision-making structures.

By explicating the emergence of digitally mediated organizational processes, the project aims to advance conceptual clarity regarding the role of DTs in organizational transformation. The expected contribution is twofold: (1) a theoretical enrichment of how DTs operate performatively within sociomaterial configurations, and (2) practical insights for organizations seeking to leverage DTs not merely as data-driven tools but as transformative infrastructures that reshape work practices and organizational capabilities.

Theoretical Background

The theoretical foundation of the project is grounded in sociomateriality, strong structuration theory (SST), and complementary perspectives from process theories. SST provides a sensitizing and analytical framework for understanding the reciprocal shaping between human agents, digital artifacts, organizational structures, and unfolding outcomes. This framework enables a nuanced explanation of how DTs become embedded into, and simultaneously transform, organizational decision-making processes. Additionally, emerging insights from digital transformation literature will inform the conceptual framing where relevant, especially concerning how organizations sense, interpret, and respond to complex operational dynamics through digital infrastructures.

Methodological Background

Methodologically, the project is positioned within qualitative, exploratory research traditions and employs a process-oriented case study design. Using a recursive process research model, the study seeks to trace how organizational processes evolve through interactions between human actors and DT systems. Data will be gathered through semi-structured interviews and secondary sources like observations, internal documents, and digital traces.

The analysis is guided by an inductive logic, drawing on grounded theory principles to allow theoretical insights to emerge from the empirical material. The empirical data will be analyzed using the Gioia method, which provides a structured, grounded theory-inspired approach to building conceptual frameworks from qualitative data. This combination enables a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how DTs shape and reshape organizational transformation over time.