Editorial: Digital technology transforms the global economy!

Citation

Qiu, R. (2022), "Editorial: Digital technology transforms the global economy!", Digital Transformation and Society, Vol. 1 No. 2, pp. 145-146. https://doi.org/10.1108/DTS-12-2022-040

Digital technology has been rapidly developed for several decades. With the quick adoption of smart and mobile digital solutions in business and society, digital technology as a powerful driving force has fast transformed the global economy. Digital technology empowers almost everything around us. Consequently, productivity gets significantly improved across all sections of industry, business and society. As witnessed, people’s daily life at work or at home has indeed substantially been beneficial from the widespread adoption of smart networks and communications, automation solutions and Internet and mobile applications.

With the fast advancement of digital technology, researchers and practitioners around the world have paid more and more attention to a variety of studies of the trends, policies, innovations and phenomena of adopting new digital technology. For example, we must know how the development of digital thread differs from digital twin, how they evolve and what kind of applications we should develop from time to time. Therefore, we can properly leverage the digital thread or digital twin technology to ensure that effective transformation will occur in business and society. This issue collects four articles related to the understandings of creations, challenges and policies in business and society when digital technology is adopted for positively transforming our economy and daily life.

Dr. Lefei Li's team reviewed a variety of published articles related to both digital thread and digital twin technology, looking into the theoretical fundamentals and research progress of digital thread. To help the audience understand the emerging technology, they provided a definition of digital thread by combining the leading perception of digital thread and digital twins in this emerging field. They took the fault diagnosis of high-speed train bogie as an example, partially demonstrating the advantages and effects brought by the digital thread connecting the data models at various product development and deployment stages.

The world has been difficultly and harshly fighting the COVID-19 pandemic since its outbreak at the end of 2019. Because of the pandemic, people realized that digital technology could be better leveraged to overcome the difficulties people were never confronted with before. Dr. Sakaya’s team investigated how a service ecosystem self-adjustment could facilitate in developing digital service capabilities and what we learned from the process of combating the COVID -19 pandemic when digital technology played an important role in helping us do the best in maintaining normal life at work and at home. They articulated that COVID-19 helped us understand that digital transformation becomes necessary today and tomorrow.

The quality of people’s life gets significantly improved over the year due to the adoption of digital technology. However, the individuals’ perception of the changes and the generated impact on their life vary with circumstances. To maximize the benefit from the adoption of new technologies, appropriate regulations are necessary. As an example, Dr. Yang's team looked into the policy trajectory of China’s globalizing Internet. They analyzed the impact of policies at the nation level and elaborated on how appropriate policies drove the growth of a country’s economy. They also uncovered that the impact on the globalization due to the enact of proper regulations was significant.

At the community level, when service products driven by digital technology, utilities as enabled tools are typically considered high priority needs. Thus, solution providers frequently pay little attention to certain psychological issues such as the need of gender nonconforming individuals. Using electronic games as an example, Dr. Zhu’s team conducted a phenomenological study of the resilience building of gender nonconforming individuals in the gaming industry. Their research was one of the pioneer investigations of gender nonconforming individuals’ resilience experiences with a particular type of casual video games and choice-based games. Their study could stimulate the establishment of more regulations to address the need of gender nonconforming individuals when digital service products are developed and deployed under certain circumstances.

Without exception, a small number of papers can be included in each released issue in Digital Transformation and Society. Please be aware that the journal promotes empirical, modeling, theoretical and application studies of all aspects in organization, business and society digitization and transformation. As always, we encourage people from all fields who are involved in digital transformation and society research, education and practice to submit their research findings to this journal. As a result, more and more scientific research and societal insights related to digital transformation can be shared in the public and learned by all readers in the digital transformation community. Gradually and integrally, this journal will make a significant difference in promoting the research, education and practice of digital transformation in society around the world.