From Recombination to Reconfiguration: affording Process Innovation in Digital Infrastructures

Egil Øvrelid, Alexander Moltubakk Kempton
2019 European Conference on Information Systems  
A central challenge for public sector institutions is to improve their innovative capability. However, they must also ensure stability by managing a vast amount of systems and procedures. In this context, improving horizontal processes across functional boundaries can be particularly challenging. Process innovation, the goal-directed restructuring of processes, can create more efficient and innovative organizations, but it requires innovative digital infrastructures. We therefore ask: how can a
more » ... digital infrastructure afford process innovation? In our framing, this implies identifying affordances as process innovation outcomes, but also describing a particular infrastructural configuration that enables these affordances. Our analysis builds on an in-depth case study at a Norwegian hospital, which has recently gone through a large-scale digitalization and innovation project. Health sector cases are pertinent to our research question, as the sector has experienced several difficulties in its initiatives to innovate and digitalize their infrastructures. We contribute to the literature on digital innovation and digital infrastructures in two ways. First, we identify a set of affordances and how they are configured together to innovate processes in a hospital. Second, we provide a framework for understanding the transition from siloed infrastructures to a more innovative digital infrastructure. By this, we provide a distinct approach to how the relation between digital innovation and process innovation can be theorized in the digital infrastructure innovation literature.
dblp:conf/ecis/OvrelidK19 fatcat:eyjait2y6fdxhhmk4o6hu4qxqq