Digitization or Digitalization? - Toward an Understanding of Definitions, Use and Application in IS Research Completed Research

Since the dotcom era around the year 2000, we observed a massive increase in technological progress. Nevertheless, with the emergence of new, elaborated digital technologies, theoretical complexity has increased simultaneously. Scholars often conceptualize the implications and the evolutionary process of adapting these technologies as digitization or digitalization. With our research, we aim to provide a clear and inter-subjective basis for common understanding of research terminology, that also supports practitioners in applying strategies with digital technologies. We conducted a systematic literature review, that sheds light on how digitization and digitalization are defined in IS literature, how the terms are used, and how researchers apply them. We present our approach to a definition and give researchers recommendations on how to use the terms explicitly. Subsequently, we discuss the different dimensions of our analysis, finding that to this point, there is no generalized conceptualization of the phenomena but a solid basis for formalizing one.