Digital Transformation, Reliability Engineering, and Sustainability Transitions: Integrating Site Reliability Engineering into Socio-Technical Infrastructures

Abstract

Digital transformation has emerged as one of the most consequential socio-technical shifts of the early twenty-first century, reshaping production systems, urban governance, agriculture, healthcare, and organizational infrastructures across both developed and developing economies. While the promises of efficiency, resilience, and sustainability associated with digitalization have been widely articulated, scholarly debates increasingly emphasize the uneven outcomes, infrastructural fragilities, and governance challenges embedded within digital transitions. This article develops an integrative and critical examination of digital transformation through the combined lenses of sustainability theory, socio-technical systems analysis, and operational reliability. Central to the argument is the proposition that sustainability-oriented digital transformation cannot be fully realized without systematic attention to infrastructural reliability, legacy system integration, and organizational learning. Drawing conceptually and analytically on Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) as articulated in recent applied engineering scholarship, including empirical insights on implementing SRE within legacy retail infrastructures (Dasari, 2025), this article situates reliability engineering as a foundational yet under-theorized pillar of sustainable digital transformation.

The study adopts a qualitative, literature-driven research design, synthesizing interdisciplinary scholarship spanning smart cities, Industry 4.0, digital agriculture, healthcare digitization, and sustainable development policy. Through extensive theoretical elaboration and comparative analysis, the article demonstrates how digital transformation initiatives frequently reproduce systemic vulnerabilities when reliability, resilience, and human-centered governance are treated as secondary concerns. The findings highlight that digital infrastructures function not merely as technical artifacts but as socio-ecological systems whose performance stability directly affects social inclusion, environmental outcomes, and institutional trust.

The results advance three core contributions. First, the article reframes digital transformation as a reliability-dependent sustainability process rather than a linear technological upgrade. Second, it integrates SRE principles—such as error budgeting, service-level objectives, and continuous monitoring—into sustainability discourse, illustrating their relevance across sectors beyond software-intensive firms. Third, it identifies persistent gaps in policy and practice, particularly in the Global South, where digital initiatives often outpace institutional capacity and infrastructural robustness.

The discussion critically engages with dominant narratives of digital optimism, addressing counter-arguments related to technological determinism and ecological rebound effects. It concludes by proposing a research agenda that bridges engineering reliability, sustainability science, and socio-technical governance. By foregrounding reliability as a sustainability enabler, the article contributes to more grounded, equitable, and resilient pathways for digital transformation.