A Model-Based Approach to Guide Digital Transformation

The digital transformation of our society is happening. In this paper, we try to provide means to deal with this phenomenon. We introduce and examine a new approach to show how to capture the impact of digital transformation methodically, and by doing so, how to guide the complex unpredictable process of digitalization in our social environment. After showing related work on artifacts, on the representation of things, on modeling, and finally on models as artifacts, we present our new model-based approach, the flow of models we developed, namely models for object characterization, hypothetical story, prediction, and test/experiment/evaluation. Furthermore, we show the context of our research, the role of models in design, and how we broaden our research context from design to digital transformation. Before we conclude our paper, we illustrate our approach on an example from health care, in the scope of an international research project.