Promoting digital sustainability through project digital responsibility implementation: An empirical analysis

To adequately facilitate project digital responsibility implementation (PDRI), a solid comprehension of the influencing factors and effective strategies that influence project digital responsibility implementation are necessary. Surprisingly, despite the increased interest in digital responsibility over the last few years, there still is a significant dearth of digital responsibility implementation. In practice, the factors that influence project digital responsibility implementation are complex and interconnected, not simple and isolated. Due to the omission of the causal relationship between these influencing factors, the project digital responsibility is not implemented effectively. This paper describes the process of identifying and classifying the factors influencing the project digital responsibility implementation, taking into account the network of interconnected factors. Four primary data sources and methodologies yielded new insights into the nature of these influential factors: a systematic literature review, semistructured interviews, fuzzy interpretative structural modeling, and cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification. Our analysis demonstrates that the 26 factors influencing project digital responsibility implementation interact and form a 9-level hierarchy. The 26 factors can be subdivided further into four dimensions: project dimension, stakeholder dimension, market environment dimension, and government dimension. Notably, the influencing factors in the government dimension have the most driving force, and adjusting the influencing factor in this dimension can enhance the influencing factors in the other dimensions. Finally, 11 policy proposals are proposed along 4 dimensions. This study bridges the knowledge gap of PDRI by providing new insights targeting the factors influencing PDRI. The findings provide valuable information for policy makers and practitioners to adopt effective measures to promote the implementation of PDRI.