Digital maturity has become a widely used concept for assessing how firms progress in digital transformation. In both managerial practice and academic research, maturity is often represented as a measurable condition that indicates how far an organization has advanced in adopting digital technologies, redesigning processes, and developing digital capabilities. This view has helped organizations diagnose digital gaps, compare current and desired states, and structure transformation initiatives. However, the dominant maturity logic also creates theoretical limitations. Many maturity models imply that firms move through relatively stable and sequential stages, even though digital transformation unfolds under uncertainty, competitive pressure, technological discontinuity, and organizational resistance. As a result, maturity scores may describe the presence of digital resources but fail to explain whether firms can adapt strategically when external conditions shift. This article reconceptualises digital maturity as strategic adaptability. Rather than treating maturity as a static stage, it defines digital maturity as the firm’s ongoing capacity to align digital strategy, organizational capabilities, resource configurations, and managerial action with changing technological and market conditions. This reinterpretation positions maturity as a dynamic, adaptive property of the firm rather than a checklist of completed digital initiatives. The contribution is threefold. First, the article critiques the static assumptions of existing digital maturity models. Second, it defines strategic adaptability as the central mechanism that translates digital maturity into transformation outcomes. Third, it offers a conceptual foundation for future empirical research and managerial diagnosis by shifting attention from maturity as status to maturity as adaptive capacity.
Modern digital work environments increasingly fracture tasks across email, instant messaging, project platforms, customer systems, shared documents, dashboards, and video meetings. This article conceptualises this condition as digital task fragmentation, defined as the systemic dispersion of work activities across multiple digital tools, communication channels, and organizational interfaces. Unlike traditional interruption or individual multitasking, digital task fragmentation is embedded in the architecture of contemporary work systems. Existing theories of work design, coordination, information processing, and managerial attention explain important aspects of task demands, communication complexity, and cognitive strain. However, they do not fully capture how digitally mediated work fragments tasks across platforms while simultaneously making workload harder to see, sequence, and govern. The result is a growing theoretical gap between how work is formally designed and how it is actually experienced in digitally intensive organizations. The objective of this article is to develop a theory-driven model of digital task fragmentation and its organizational consequences. The model links fragmentation to workload dispersion, coordination costs, managerial attention depletion, and downstream outcomes for productivity, employee well-being, decision quality, and organizational agility. The article positions fragmentation as both a work-design problem and an attention-allocation problem. The article contributes by naming and theorising digital task fragmentation as a distinct organizational phenomenon. It shows how tool proliferation, always-on communication, and hybrid work arrangements disperse tasks and increase hidden coordination burdens. The proposed framework provides a basis for future measurement, empirical testing, and managerial redesign of digital work systems.
Institute for Management, Business, and Accounting Studies