Approaching the journey of digital transformation in public sector culturalorganisations

Abstract: The public cultural sector in Sweden has been facing the challenges of digitalization over the last decade. The Swedish government has over these past years introduced various strategies and visions for taking advantage of the opportunities that digitalization provides. Due to the implications of the pandemic, many public cultural sector organisations were forced to go through some form of rapid digitalization. However, it is not known how these rapid digital efforts will affect the public cultural sector going forward. Digitalization is not a one-time event, a change in organisational strategy, processes and culture need to happen for digital transformation to occur. The case study of Malmö Opera examines the digitizing activities between 2017 - 2022 in the context of digital transformation. The results of the study showed that although digital efforts had been made prior to the pandemic, a rapid period of digitization occurred during the pandemic years. During 2020 and 2021 the organization took substantial strides in digital progress speed up by the impacts of the pandemic. After the restrictions lifted, digital developments in Malmö Opera were at a slow down due to a lack of dedicated recourses that had be available during the pandemic. The findings of this theses suggests that digital transformation is one way to face the challenges that digitalisation provides. By applying a framework or process for the digital transformation journey this provides a tool for decision makers for how to approach digital transformation on an organisational level.