Abstract—For higher education institutions that encourage digital transformation, understanding the barriers are necessary for the digital transformation accomplishment. The purpose of this paper is to present a review of the literature on barriers to digital transformation in higher education. To get a wide overview in identifying the barriers to the implementation of digital transformation, a structured literature review was used to select the relevant studies published. Nine categories were identified based on the literature reviewed: vision, strategy and policy, resources, leadership, digital skill and knowledge, technology, adaptability, resistance to change, and government and economic. Our findings provided a fish-bone diagram that outlines twenty-two barriers to digital transformation in higher education. The main contribution of this study is a synthesis of the state of the art of barriers to digital transformation in higher education. We contribute to provide a common basic understanding of barriers to digital transformation in higher education to overcome barriers for improving the possibility of success. Moreover, we give an insight into future research on barriers exploration in the context of digital transformation in higher education. Index Terms—Digital transformation, digital technology, digital innovation, higher education, policymakers, barriers framework. I. INTRODUCTION The trend of implementing digital transformation in the higher education sector began to be widely discussed in 2017 to respond to the effect of industrial revolution 4.0. At that time, a study was conducted on the total of 282 higher education institutions in developed and developing countries [1], [2], showing that the majority of their digital transformation journey was still in the initial stage, while others were already about one-third of the digital transformation implementation. However, the trend of digital transformation in 2020 increased, especially after the coronavirus broke out. During the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education institutions around the world were forced to use technology to support their teaching and learning process [3]. Based on this, it can be concluded that the higher education institutions in many countries have shown their awareness and understanding of the need for a digital transformation. By implementing digital transformation, the Manuscript received April 14, 2021; revised June 23, 2021. B. R. Aditya is with the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia. He is also with School of Applied Science, Telkom University, Indonesia (corresponding author; e-mail: bayu@tass.telkomuniversity.ac.id). R. Ferdiana and S. S. Kusumawardani are with the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia (e-mail: ridi@ugm.ac.id, suning@ugm.ac.id). management of higher education institutions will be greatly helped to complete the higher education strategy by adding innovation to the system management and education program. However, the digital transformation approach will be difficult to be successfully implemented in higher education institutions that are not familiar with change and innovation. This is because educational institutions at least must go through two crucial processes in implementing digital transformation: 1) the change process towards new education environment [4]-[6], and 2) the process of technology adoption and integration to the education system [7], [8]. In other words, implementing digital transformation in higher education is not an easy matter. There are still many barriers to the implementation of digital transformation in the higher education sector. The basic problem that underlies this study was about what barriers need to be considered when implementing digital transformation in higher education. Even though several barriers to digital transformation in higher education had been identified by previous literature [1], [9], [10], there was no concept in those studies developed to compile the description and list of the barriers completely. Therefore, in practice, the use of definition and description of the barriers to digital transformation in higher education sector becomes unclear. With that in mind, as the ground necessity, which is also the problem that must be solved by this research, it is important to have a comprehensive common understanding about what types of barriers can be found when implementing the digital transformation program in the higher education sector. Therefore, it is important to formulate and define the barriers systematically and thoroughly in the context of digital transformation in the higher education sector [11]. II. METHOD To get a wide overview in identifying the barriers to the implementation of digital transformation, a structured literature review adopted by Petersen et al. [12] was used to select the relevant studies published. Based on Fig. 1, we followed five main steps to carry out a mapping process: 1) we determined the research question, 2) we determined search terms, 3) we filtered the literature, 4) we excluded the criteria, and 5) we synthesized the relevant literature. In the first step, we defined a research question. The basic problem that underlies this study was about what barriers could affect the implementation of digital transformation in higher education. To answer the question, in the second step, we used a combination of "digital transformation", "higher Categories for Barriers to Digital Transformation in Higher Education: An Analysis Based on Literature Bayu Rima Aditya, Ridi Ferdiana, and Sri Suning Kusumawardani International Journal of Information and Education Technology, Vol. 11, No. 12, December 2021 658 doi: 10.18178/ijiet.2021.11.12.1578