Search

Agile transformation is being adopted by the public sector to accelerate digitalization, but it often prioritizes internal efficiency over public values. In this ongoing case study of agile transformation in a large public organization in Norway, we apply a practice-theoretic lens to analyze changes in practices. By looking at papers that has published in recent years on this case, The open coding method was used to identify the components of the practices, including competence, meaning, and material. The study revealed that agile transformation led to a shift in software development practices, improved communication, and increased authority, which enhanced ownership, productivity, and organizational learning. The role of architects changed to advisors, and teams took full decision-making authority for managing data and architecture. The analysis of transformed practices revealed the organization made changes to allow development teams to be more autonomous and flexible in their projects. However, the organization's inherent bias towards development teams seems to hamper effective collaboration and undermines democratic participation, a fundamental value of the public sector. Also, the study also illustrates the need for boundary work and infrastructures that integrate the users/business side of the organization, beyond the development side, to address complex socio-technical interdependencies.

The need for new digitally enhanced solutions has led companies in traditionally non-digital industries to explore the potential of digital innovation. Various process frameworks claim their ability to support this endeavor by facilitating the digital innovation process. However, such frame-works alone may not be sufficient because digital innovation in established firms tends to involve numerous actors with competing interests. This introduces the need to manage the competing concerns in order to orchestrate the digital innovation process. Knowledge about how the organizational actors negotiate, agree, and collectively drive the innovation process forward thus becomes crucial. This interpretive case study describes how participants of a digital innovation program in an established maritime company manage their competing concerns through four negotiation episodes: Mobilizing of internal stakeholders, Developing capacity for faster decision-making, Pricing new digital services, and Establishing a connection between business and development. The results indicate that negotiating competing concerns is necessary for the incumbents to move forward with their digital innovation and that communities of practice can facilitate such negotiations. We conclude that recombination of the established processes as an outcome of such negotiations is necessary to succeed with digital innovation in incumbent firms.

Facility management, which concerns the administration, operations, and maintenance of buildings, is a sector undergoing significant changes while becoming digitalized and data driven. In facility management sector, companies seek to extract value from data about their buildings. As a consequence, craftsmen, such as janitors, are becoming involved in data curation. Data curation refers to activities related to cleaning, assembling, setting up, and stewarding data to make them fit existing templates. Craftsmen in facility management, despite holding a pivotal role for successful data curation in the domain, are understudied and disregarded. To remedy this, our holistic case study investigates how janitors’ data curation practices shape the data being produced in three facility management organizations. Our findings illustrate the unfortunate that janitors are treated more like a sensor than a human data curator. This treatment makes them less engaged in data curation, and hence do not engage in a much necessary correction of essential facility data. We apply the conceptual lens of invisible work – work that blends into the background and is taken for granted – to explain why this happens and how data comes to be. The findings also confirm the usefulness of a previously proposed analytical framework by using it to interpret data curation practices within facility management. The paper contributes to practitioners by proposing training and education in data curation.

Large-scale agile transformation implies that agile approaches are moving from standalone in-formation system development units such as teams towards being applied in more complex organi-sational settings with multiple and diverse units. Research on large-scale agile transformation suggests that agile methods with its focus on mutual adjustment increases interdependencies be-tween diverse units. However, extant empirical research on how interdependencies can be man-aged in large-scale agile transformations is scarce. We report from an interpretative case study of an agile transformation initiative in a company with 20.000 employees. Based on data from 32 interviews combined with participatory observation in retrospectives we analyse how “collabora-tion rooms” are used to manage the interdependence between heterogeneous units, and how the collaboration rooms are conceived by information systems development practitioners as an agile transformation initiative. Using the concept of trading zones we contribute by discussing how het-erogeneous units can manage interdependencies by using collaboration rooms as a minimum via-ble common ground. We discuss how the minimum viable ground i) fit new practices with existing practices, ii) allows flatter decision structures, and iii) is a subtle and iterative approach to organ-izational transformation.

Recent research emphasizes the distinctive characteristic of innovation in public sector as opposed to that in the private sector. Several researchers point to the need for open and networked innovation for the public sector to succeed in addressing societal challenges. Innovation networks are specifically important in digital transformation where the generative nature of the digital requires a high level of messiness and continued informal exchange of knowledge among the innovation actors. On the other hand, the public sector is subject to strict regulations related to fairness in procurement of new, innovative digital solutions. The public sector needs to balance between digital transformation's need for informal processes and simultaneously adherence to formal procurement processes regulated by laws. Our goal in this paper is to empirically illustrate how this balancing act develops in innovative public procurement processes, a new method for procurement aiming for achieving innovation through procurement. We report from an empirical case study of innovative public procurement in the Norwegian public sector. Our findings show how, in innovative public procurement, project managers and procurers in the public sector must change their roles, difficulties arise when changing from purchasing offthe-shelf solutions to more continuous processes, and how there are tensions in the vendor-public sector networks. By using the lenses of open innovation and digital transformation, we identify discrepancies between the literature and the current public sector procurement practices.

Current digital transformation moves information systems development into larger transformation programs with higher strategic significance and increased complexity in organization. Agile and BizDev are among the practical methods used to practice digital transformation. These methods are characterized by autonomous and diverse teams, and experimental development with the aim of achieving faster time-to-market and customer centric digital offerings. While empirical evidence points to positive effects of such methods in smaller projects, we know less about how key aspects of agile work with increasing interdependencies resulting from larger, more complex organization. Driven by our research question - how are interdependencies addressed in agile digital transformation – we contribute by presenting findings from an empirical case study of a bank practicing agile digital transformation. Applying a theoretical lens of dynamic interactions, our findings sensitize us to the necessity of negotiations, and suggest the need for more research on of the role of divergent evaluative principles in agile digital transformation.

Prosjektet Ung IT handler om digitale løsninger som kan øke deltakelse i fritidsaktiviteter for barn og unge med nedsatt funksjonsevne. Prosjektet ser spesielt på mulighetene til en selvorganiserende digital plattform for formidling av informasjon om fritidsaktiviteter. Forskning viser at dårlig tilgang og kvaliteten på slik informasjon er viktige årsaker til at barn og unge ikke deltar i fritidsaktiviteter. Prosjektet har gjennomført flere intervjuer og workshoper med både familier, kommuneansatte og arrangører av fritidsaktiviteter. Vi har belyst informasjonsbehovet. Vi har også sett på hva selvorganisering betyr, hvorfor det er viktig i denne sammenhengen, og hvordan man kan lage en selvorganiserende digital plattform for denne gruppen. Oppdragsgiver: Trondheim kommune The goal of the project Ung IT at the municipality of Trondheim, Norway, is to elicit requirements for a self-organising digital platform to share information about leisure activities for children and young people with disabilities. A new platform is intended to be developed in a follow-up project, with the goal to increase the participation of the target group in leisure activities. The motivation for this project is the perceived lack of high quality information about leisure activities in the region. We don't have enough knowledge about the role such information plays for the families, and what children, young people and parents want in such information. Our findings show that access to information about leisure activities is highly sought after among the interviewed families. In our study we have interviewed a number of stakeholders, including children and young people, their parents, employees at the municipality, organisers of leisure activities, and IT vendors. Through interviews and workshops we have shed light on how families search for, find and use information about leisure activities they want to participate to, what they think about the quality of such information, what challenges they meet, and how they think digital solutions can improve the situation. We have also investigated the challenges that the municipality and organisers have related to producing good quality information, and making this information available. Our findings show that there is a lack of high quality and relevant information about leisure activities, and that this lack of information creates barriers to participation. Our findings also show that it is difficult for organisers to produce and make this information available. More specifically, our findings show that: • Descriptions of leisure activities often lack information about what kind of disabilities are accommodated for and who the intended user group is. • Information about adaptation to specific disabilities is not standardised and difficult to search for. • Children and young people with disabilities have very different requirements for adaptation. This makes it difficult for organisers to describe all possible adaptation scenarios. • Families have suboptimal experiences related to participation in leisure activities because of a mismatch between available information about the activity, and the actual adaptation exercised during the activity. • Activity organisers often lack incentives, tools and resources needed to make high quality information about their activities available online. • Information about activities is often shared through informal channels. This can exclude families who don't have an extensive network of friends. In order to develop a digital platform, Trondheim municipality should: • Have an initial dialog with the stakeholders involved to create a strategy for ownership and operational aspects of a platform. • Choose a technical solution that supports distribution of information and its maintenance. Information about leisure activities is highly distributed and should not be centralised. Automatic collection of information, and mechanisms from social media and crowdsourcing can be used. • A strong incentive model should be in place to motivate organisers to make quality information available online. Children and parents should be able to augment this information. • The platform should be co-designed with the families and the organisers so that it can provide them with an easy-to-use interface.