Back to the future: Actualizing technology affordances to transform Emperor Qin’s terracotta warriors Museum

Digital transformation brings new opportunities and challenges to organizations as they make radical changes to their operation, business and value creation processes. This paper presents an in-depth case study of the Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s Mausoleum Site Museum in China to discuss the promises and challenges that arise during a digital transformation. Our findings uncover several affordances of emerging technologies that were actualized for the museum’s transformation, as well as several unintended consequences that arose during the process. Our conceptualization of the enabling and constraining mechanisms serve to inspire further investigations into the transformational changes in organizations and their paradoxical implications.