Towards a Roadmap for Developing Digital Work Practices: A Maturity Model Approach

The digital economy brings us a wide range of services and products assisted by emerging technologies in Industry 4.0. Nevertheless, already since the 1990s and early 2000s, IT has had a huge impact on the digitalization and digitization of businesses. This phenomenon of advancing in digital-oriented work practices is not only affecting the customer side, but is also changing theway ofworking within organizations. Although employees are one of the crucial elements in each organization and their level of work satisfaction is critical to the efficiency of a business, their work impression is still undergoing scrutiny when it gets to digital process innovations. Moreover, organizations still benefit from assistance in their adoption of digital-oriented work practices, for which a related maturity model (MM) can be one of the solutions. The current Ph.D. plan consists of three research projects that follow a mixed-method approach with a combination of quantitative and qualitative designs, within an overall design of Design-Science Research (DSR). Project 1 has two subprojects (i.e., a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) and a data-driven analysis). It starts with analyzing the relevant literature from a people-process-technology (PPT) perspective to extract relevant factors when digitalizing business processes. Afterwards, it investigates a representative set of European employee data using statistical data analysis (e.g., factor analysis and ANOVA) and data mining (e.g., clustering) techniques to delve into the impact of digital-oriented work practices on work satisfaction. After this artefact identification, we continue with Project 2 (i.e., expert panel, case study) to add evidence for a maturity-based gradation along with the identified clusters of digital-oriented work practices. Finally, Project 3 helps concretize the intendedMMby focusing on the relationships with employee satisfaction and the relevant factors. Our findings will assist organizations to upgrade theirwork practices (i.e., including assessment and improvement advice), while simultaneously empowering their employees.