Operationalizing Digital Resilience – A Systematic Literature Review on Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract

Building a digital resilience (i.e., capabilities to design, deploy and use information systems (IS) to adjust to changes caused by external shocks) may prepare individuals, organizations and other institutions for future disruptions caused by global crises. To be able to monitor the emergence and development of digital resilience, one needs to be able to measure it. Currently, there is no consensus in IS literature on how to conceptualize or operationalize resilience. By conducting a systematic literature review, we identify traditional and innovative operationalization approaches. We find scale-based quantitative methods to be most prominent, followed by qualitative analyses of resilience indicators through interviews and case studies. We identify advantages and limitations of each approach and encourage authors to move beyond the boundaries of traditional methods and incorporate innovative approaches – some of which we present in this paper – to operationalize digital resilience in a tailored, context-specific way. Challenges and opportunities are discussed.