Indicadores de Rendimiento de las Familias

Given the evolving, heterogeneous nature of digital infrastructures, a close focus on the legacy IT in organizations is required. Hanseth & Lyytinen (2010) call the socio-technical system at the heart of such infrastructures the “installed base” (following Star & Ruhleder 1996) and point out that it can both enable and constrain the evo-lution of infrastructures. Legacy IT is an established area of Information Systems research and practice (e.g. Jacobson et al. 1999). Willcocks et al. (2002) show the importance of infrastructure, seen as a socio-technical construct, in the delivery of operations. The concept of the evolving installed base takes up older threads of sociotechnical Information Systems research that argued for limits of rationality in the planning of information systems. Orlikowski (1996) speaks of situated change based on on-going practices of organizational actors.

In this thesis, IT will be conceptualized as the installed base of hardware and software within a digital infrastructure. The focus is on how this installed base has grown over time and how it evolves as people interacting with IT within the digital infrastructures try to adapt it to their needs. Due to this evolving nature of digital infrastructures, information systems are seen as less amenable to rational planning here than they would be in more traditional conceptualizations. Some research on

digital infrastructures has focussed successfully on this process of evolution and shown how it occurs in the socio-technical assemblage of digital infrastructures (e.g.

Henfridsson & Bygstad 2013). Hylving & Schultze (2013) conceptualize the evolu-tion of the instrument cluster in a car using the concept of infrastructure. Venters et al. (2014) research the tensions involved in the coordination of the emergence of a grid infrastructure. Given the capacity of technology to both enable or constrain change (Star & Ruhleder 1996; Hanseth & Lyytinen 2010), they can be seen both as success factors or obstacles, depending on the context. Thus, the case study will look for evidence of both.

3.3.2 People

The next key element of digital infrastructures are the people using and designing the IT within the digital infrastructure. An important characteristic of digital infrastruc-tures, according to Tilson et al.'s (2010) definition, is that they are seen as sociotech-nical. Thus, they are placed in the tradition of sociotechnical research outlined above. It is worth discussing some aspects of this that are relevant for how this research project will be conducted. The traditional sociotechnical view sees informa-tion systems as “man-machine systems” (Mumford 1995) and has a strong ethical drive, arguing for the importance of involving workers in the design of information systems and the idea of jointly optimizing social and technical systems. Land &

Hirschheim (1983) argue that information systems failures can be avoided if infor-mation systems are seen as social rather than technical systems. This thesis will acknowledge these ideas by focussing on agility as a performance by users and de-velopers within a digital infrastructure. The relevance of such a view of organiza-tions has been argued elsewhere: E.g. Wenger (1998) conceptualizes them as con-stellations of communities of practice where people share knowledge and skills with each other. Recently, the term ‘sociotechnical’ seems to imply mainly that systems are seen to include people, but does not necessarily come with the emancipatory ideals of its original proponents (Winter et al. 2014; Sarker, Chatterjee, et al. 2013).

In this thesis, digital infrastructures are conceptualized as sociotechnical systems within an organization that serve a particular purpose. Thus, the users and developers within digital infrastructures have a key role in shaping their use and future develop-ment. It is, however, important to point out that organizations themselves should not

be conceptualized as digital infrastructures. Tilson et al. (2010) see digital infrastruc-tures both as a “class of IT artifacts” (p. 748) and as “sociotechnical systems” (ibid.).

Thus, it would be possible to see either a specific artefact (e.g. one system used by an organization that has evolved over time) or the sociotechnical assemblage of people in an organization and the portfolio of systems they use as infrastructural. On the one hand, it is useful to have such a broad definition of digital infrastructures as information systems are becoming more complex, e.g. being made up of systems in several companies or hosted centrally in the cloud. For example, Willcocks et al.

(2013) have argued that companies are increasingly becoming “amorphous” as these boundaries are becoming blurry. On the other hand, the concept of digital infrastruc-tures is only useful if there is a clear distinction of what it does and does not entail. It is argued here that, while it does not make sense to see Telco itself, or every IT artefact within it, as a digital infrastructure, it does make sense to conceptualize such sociotechnical systems within the company as digital infrastructures.

Finally, the concept of the organization has received a number of different defini-tions in the course of its history. March & Simon (1993) define organizadefini-tions as

“systems of coordinated action among individuals and groups whose preferences, information, interests, or knowledge differ” (p. 2). They argue for seeing decision making and the flow of information within organizations as the central construct, thus shifting the interest from the received view of organizations as hierarchies (Gulick & Urwick 1969). As the literature review has shown, such organizational processes and bureaucracy can affect agility. These can be seen as parts of a control system (Beniger 1986) designed to help the organization achieve its goals. Interes-tingly, as Beniger points out, the need to process information was what drove the development of the modern bureaucratic organization in the first place. Yates (1989) shows how such formal internal communication became the principal tool for mana-gerial control as this control was exercised on the basis of flows of information and orders. She conceptualizes these as including “upward flows of communication [that] drew data and analyses up the hierarchy to serve as the basis for managerial control of finances, facilities, materials, and processes” (p. xvii).

This thesis acknowledges the role of users and developers by focusing on how they interact with, and shape, IT within the various digital infrastructures researched in

the case study. This is conceptualized in the notion of agility as a performance (by these users and developers), which will be introduced in the next section (3.4).

3.3.3 Information

As pointed out above, data and information play a key role in information systems post-digitalization. Thus, information is conceptualized as an element of digital infrastructures here. This idea goes back to Hanseth & Lyytinen (2010), who speak of “information infrastructures” and whose definition has been adapted by Tilson et al. (2010). While Tilson et al. do not focus on the role of data or information in digital infrastructures, they do point out that “data play a significantly different role in digital infrastructures than, say, a car in relation to transportation infrastructures”

(p. 752) due to the unique properties of digital objects. They see this as one of the factors making digital infrastructures generative.

There is no consensus on how to define the terms ‘data’ and ‘information’. As McKinney & Yoos (2010) show, “‘[i]nformation’ is poorly defined in the Informa-tion Systems research literature, and is almost always unspecified, a reflexive, all-purpose but indiscriminant solution to an unbounded variety of problems” (p. 329).

Indeed, the most common use of the term they find, the token view, sees information as synonymous with data. Kettinger & Li (2010) find that “[d]ata (…) have been generally defined as the measure or description of objects or events” (p. 411) and

“[i]nformation is usually defined as data processed into a form that has meaning to the user” (p. 412). This view of data as raw information is also the predominant view applied in recent Information Systems papers on data (e.g. Aaltonen & Tempini 2014; Constantiou & Kallinikos 2014). This thesis adopts a somewhat different view, based on that advocated by Checkland & Holwell (1998):

there is a distinction to be made between the great mass of facts and the sub-set of them which we select for attention, those to which we pay heed.

The obvious word for the mass of [f]acts is ‘data’ (p. 89).

Consequently, this thesis will see data as facts of the world. Whereas Checkland &

Holwell coin the term ‘capta’ for the sub-set of data that is captured, this is called

‘information’ here². This means that this thesis will talk about information (rather

2 This view has been inspired by Neil Ingebrigtsen’s blog, www.infogineering.net.

than data) stored and processed in digital infrastructures. Figure 2 illustrates the elements of digital infrastructures as conceptualized in this thesis.

Figure 2 Elements of digital infrastructures

This view has several benefits: First, it enables a clear distinction between the concepts of data and information. It also affords seeing data as a (by-)product of business operations and information as the result of attempts by the organization to make use of data. The next chapter will illustrate how this aligns with the critical realist ontology underlying the research design in this thesis. The focus on the inter-actions between the elements of the digital infrastructure is also supported by the relational character of digital infrastructures. Based on these elements, the following interactions are proposed:

 Information enters the digital infrastructure when data from within the organization or from the outside world is captured and processed.

 Information is stored in IT. IT collects and processes information.

 IT supports the users, who in turn engage with and shape IT.

 Information informs the users, who in turn interact with it and modify it.

It is important to point out that these are just the main interactions and that the elements of digital infrastructures work together in each of them. For example, in the first interaction:

People IT – installed

base

Information Digital

infrastructure

Data Organization/

outside world

 Information enters the digital infrastructure when data from within the organization or from the outside world is captured and processed,

the processing and capturing of data is done by IT. Moreover, IT imposes limitations on this interaction, e.g. by speed or capacity restrictions or concerns for security and data protection. People have an important role here as well as they decide what data is relevant for them and trigger the capture of data. The role of information is very relevant throughout – e.g. in the interaction:

 IT supports the users, who in turn engage with and shape IT.

This interaction is fundamentally about the exchange of information. As mentioned before, this is an important part of managerial control (Yates 1989). More important in this study is the fact that the information processed by Telco employees can be seen as a digital object (Kallinikos et al. 2012) enabling generative uses. Table 6 gives an overview of how the different elements affect the proposed interactions.

Interaction Role of IT Role of people Role of information Information enters

Table 6 Elements of digital infrastructures supporting interactions