Digital transformation is often governed as a portfolio of technology initiatives even when its consequences extend to strategy, organizational design, workforce roles, interorganizational relationships, and the allocation of decision authority. This mismatch creates a recurrent governance problem: organizations can adopt digital technologies while remaining strategically fragmented, organizationally inert, or unable to coordinate the capabilities needed to convert deployment into sustained transformation. This article develops an original non-empirical governance architecture that treats digital transformation as a problem of cross-layer coherence rather than technology adoption alone. Drawing on recent organization, information-systems, strategy, leadership, human-resource, and public-management scholarship, the analysis distinguishes strategic coherence, digital leadership, workforce adaptation, cross-boundary coordination, legacy constraints, and capability reconfiguration while preserving their different levels of analysis. The proposed architecture organizes these domains through interdependent transformation layers and governance gates that test whether strategic intent, organizational arrangements, workforce capacity, coordination requirements, and technology choices remain mutually workable as transformation unfolds. It further treats misalignment, inertia, employee reactance, structural dilemmas, and context-specific constraints as potential failure conditions rather than deviations from a presumed linear maturity path. The contribution is conceptual: it integrates dispersed mechanisms into a governance logic that can structure diagnosis, escalation, and rework without claiming a universally optimal sequence or validated performance effect. Its principal boundary is evidential heterogeneity across sectors, organization sizes, institutional settings, technologies, and analytical levels; prospective and longitudinal validation is therefore required before the architecture can be treated as predictive or implementation-ready.
