Measuring the Grand Challenge of the Digital Transformation of Society: Practices for Operationalizing Robust Action Strategies

The digital transformation of society presents potential solutions to achieve goals, such as ending poverty, mitigating climate change impacts, promoting human equality, and other challenges identified in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. At the same time, the digital transformation is responsible for new challenges-such as fake news, Internet addiction, and cyberbullying-and for potentially promoting new sources of inequality and discrimination. For its complex, uncertain and evaluative nature, the digital transformation is one of the "grand challenges " of our time. Robust actions are lines of action that allow organizations to tackle grand challenges and formulate specific robust strategies (Ferraro et al., Organization Studies, 2015). This article investigates the practices and mechanisms included in the robust actions and strategies to improve information society assessments (ISA), i.e., measurements of the digital transformation of society. We investigated Cetic.br, a Brazilian ISA organization, to learn how ISA contributes to respond to the grand challenge of digital transformation from a management perspective. Beyond the measurement processes that represent a robust action to tackle the grand challenge of the digital transformation of society, the study of the Cetic.br case help us to improve the understanding on robust strategies implementation to the level of practices and mechanisms comprising them.