Digital Transformation Processes in Large Infrastructure Owners: An Organizational Change Perspective

Abstract

Large infrastructure owners (LIOs) own and operate the critical infrastructure that underpins modern society. Under growing demands for efficiency and resilience, digital transformation (DT) entailing both technological and organizational change has become a strategic necessity for LIOs to sustain service delivery. The change process of DT in LIOs unfolds under the competing demands of digital initiatives and high-reliability operations, which converge on organizational members expected to enact the initiatives while upholding uninterrupted services. However, existing studies on DT in LIOs have concentrated on technology adoption, and broader DT process research leaves unexplained how members come to enact transformation. To address these gaps, this study focuses on the internal change process of DT in LIOs, examining how organizational strategies deepen member engagement across stages. Adopting an organizational change lens and a cross-level process framework that spans organizational and individual levels, we trace how organizations reshape established arrangements to bring members into DT. Through a single-case study of a Chinese airport group, we identify three stage-specific strategic mechanisms: establishing legitimacy under authoritative leadership, enacting safety-first logics in technology and organizing, and embedding identity change among members. A member-centric process model is then abstracted, conceptualizing DT progression as a recursive process advanced through deepening member engagement under specific contextual conditions. This study contributes to research on DT in LIOs by delineating how they sequence and adapt their strategies to realize systemic DT, enriches the broader DT literature by tracing DT progression through member engagement, and advances organizational change research by elucidating the recursive interplay between strategies and member responses that sustains DT as continuous change. Practically, advancing DT in LIOs requires drawing legitimacy and capabilities from outside the organization, while deriving opportunities from continuous operations and creating authorized space for digital work within them.