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This paper aims that digital transformation (DT) is crucial for companies to stay competitive. While research on DT has quickly gained great popularity, the intersection of trade associations (TAs) and their role in the DT of their members is not yet researched.

In this paper, the authors conducted 20 interviews with Belgian TAs to investigate the role of a TAs in the DT of its members, and how they drive the DT of its members. In addition, the authors investigate the core tasks of TAs, the need of the different industries to digitalize, and the digital projects the different industries are working on.

The findings indicate that TAs can be in a prime position to steer the DT of their members, especially for industries comprised of smaller players. Their roles can range from informing roles to true leaders of DT by creating novel products, such as online platforms and driving the entire sector forwards.

These findings call for more research into TAs and how their role can be optimized for steering DT of their members.

This is the first study to extensively study the role of TAs on the DT of their members.

Digital transformation (DT) projects are complex and often unsuccessful. While researchers have suggested many guidelines and best practices on how to successfully roll out DT projects and how they are spread among a large number of scientific papers. The aim of this paper is to synthesize these guidelines into clear overviews.

A systematic literature review was conducted on both Scopus and Web of Science to search for papers suggesting DT guidelines or best practices. In total, 150 papers dealing with DT and guidelines were fully analyzed.

Eight main DT guidelines were found and each one was expanded with several best practices on how to implement these. The results are eight tables giving an overview of the commonly agreed-upon best practices for each DT guideline.

These overviews are useful for both researchers and practitioners, to guide future work and to be inspired respectively. This paper calls for more research on how these guidelines are followed in practice, how these differ per industry and what their impact is on the overall success of DT projects.

The synthesis of DT guidelines organized into an accessible format has not yet been conducted before, and can serve as a seminal pinpoint for future research.