HIDROLOGÍA SUBTERRÁNEA

8.3.1 Introduction

This thesis should be seen as a first step towards a programme to research agility in digital infrastructures. At the end of the thesis, it is useful to consider how this pro-gramme might be developed. The contributions of this thesis to the area of research it addressed have been discussed in detail in Chapter 7. This section will sum up the contributions, including those that go beyond the immediate research area, and outline plans for future research.

A key element of a future research programme will be digitalization and its conse-quences, which leads to a focus on conceptualizing information systems as digital infrastructures. This lens has provided useful insights in this thesis, so it seems pro-mising to develop it further and apply it to other areas. This will also include a focus

on the role of information in digital infrastructures. As pointed out in the discussion (7.4), critical realism has turned out to be useful for conceptualizing such socio-technical phenomena as the domain of the real can be seen as containing digital infrastructures and the generative mechanisms acting on them.

Thus the combination of practice based research, digital infrastructures and critical realism appears to be a strong foundation for conducting Information Systems re-search in the tradition of the social sciences. More specifically, the areas of contri-bution of this thesis can be developed into publications elaborating on these ideas.

These will be outlined next.

8.3.2 Theory of agility

The theory of agility as a performance within digital infrastructures developed in the previous chapter has been described as the main theoretical contribution of this thesis. The proposed mechanism of agilization can be used to describe efforts to enable agility in an organization with a focus on the concepts used in this thesis. The theory adds the concept of digital infrastructures to the literature on organizational agility and extends the literature on agility as a performance by conceptualizing agility as a performance in such infrastructures.

This thesis supports the view of agility as a collective performance, which was shown to be a viable alternative to the predominant view of agility as a capability.

The concept of agility as a performance has not been used broadly. This thesis con-tributes to the literature by applying the concept in the new context of a large company. It also relates it to digital infrastructures, which are defined as relational.

There seems to be potential to further develop this relationship in future research.

This view of agility was extended in this thesis by adopting a critical realist onto-logy: The performance of agility must be analysed indirectly through people's reports on it and is contingently caused by generative mechanisms. A focus on uncovering such causal mechanisms can lead to research results that can be more broadly generalized (Avgerou 2013; McGrath 2013).

The theory of agility as a performance within digital infrastructures developed in this thesis contributes to the area of organizational agility research (e.g. Sambamurthy et al. 2003; Mathiassen & Pries-Heje 2006; Roberts & Grover 2012). At the same time,

applying the concept of digital infrastructures in traditional, large companies takes up Tilson et al.'s (2010) broad call for research aimed at a better understanding of the ways in which infrastructural change shapes information systems development. The theory developed in this thesis should be developed further and applied to other contexts. As discussed, one way to do this would be through a case survey (Hen-fridsson & Bygstad 2013). This could shed some more light on the question of how contingent the framework is on the specific conditions within Telco. This would also contribute to the wider area of Information Systems strategy research, which has acknowledged the usefulness of the infrastructure concept (Galliers 2011), but not yet applied it broadly.

8.3.3 Bounded agility

Moreover, this thesis developed the concept of bounded agility, defined as “striving for agility only within the limits set by the digital infrastructures or the organiza-tion”. Agility is seen as bounded in degree and in scope: The desire by people in Telco to be agile is bounded by limiting factors within the digital infrastructures (degree). Also, agility occurred in small pockets within Telco (scope), so the overall running of the business was not jeopardized.

As illustrated at the beginning of this thesis, there is broad interest in the concept of agility among practitioners and researchers. Little was found in the literature to mitigate this, as research generally does not question the usefulness of agility. The concept of bounded agility can be helpful in this context as it enables practitioners to consider organizational agility from a more balanced perspective, by weighing it against stability and the on-going operations of the business and considering its boundaries in degree and in scope. As the literature on organizational agility gene-rally does not consider such limits, but presents it as universally desirable (Overby et al. 2006; Salmela et al. 2015), the concept of bounded agility provides a necessary corrective (see 7.3). It is related to the established concept of ambidexterity, but adds the notion of striving for the right level of agility. This has been illustrated using the notion of the dual nature of IT, information and people as well as the water meta-phor, which describes organizations as either frozen, liquid or gaseous according to their agility and argues for a temporary unfreezing of small parts of the organizations

to create pockets of agility. Based on the findings of the case study, it would be useful to develop this into a publication aimed at practitioners.

8.3.4 Data and information in critical realism

Given the centrality of these terms for the field, it seems important to come up with definitions that clearly separate ‘data’ from ‘information’, and to use them consis-tently. The view of information and data outlined here seems promising as it clearly distinguishes these terms and aligns them to the ontology of critical realism. It sees data as facts of the world and information as data stored and processed in informa-tion systems. This has turned out useful for the analysis, as it has led to the mecha-nism of informatization, which refers to the conversion of data to information.

Following this view, information systems can be seen as efforts to capture “the facts of the world” from the domain of the actual and store them (in the domain of the empirical) in order to make them accessible for analysis. This would apply to e.g.

management information systems capturing real-time production data and turning it into information to present in a dashboard, but also to the “quantified self” move-ment (Shih et al. 2015), where individuals gain insight into their habits, e.g. by counting their daily steps (data) and storing them as information in web-based information systems in order to analyse and share it.

As illustrated above, it might be worth developing this further, as the field of Infor-mation Systems would benefit from having clear definitions of these central terms.

Following (McKinney & Yoos 2010), it would be possible to conduct a similar study on the use of the term ‘data’ in Information Systems research. Moreover, as the definitions developed in this thesis align well with the stratified ontology of critical realism, such research might be interesting for the community of researchers follow-ing this ontology.