How organizations collaborate in the Digital Transformation towards Sustainability

Digital transformation is already changing and improving our society towards sustainable development. However, this process is complex and often requires collaborative efforts between organizations. To better understand how organizations collaborate in the digital transformation towards sustainability, we present a case study of digital transformation in Denmark’s district heating. Using the theory of Process Multiplicity that explains how a single process can potentially unfold in many ways, we report how private and public companies have collaborated over two years in their digital transformation. Our analysis identifies three processes that explain how these organizations successfully collaborate by 1) establishing ownership of problematic situations, 2) compromising on ideal problem-solving, and 3) setting boundaries in problem-solving. We conclude the paper by discussing how unfolding the collaboration between organizations can nuance our understanding of collaboration in digital transformation in IS research

Infrastructuring In Digital Transformation: An Action Case Study Of District Heating

Digital transformation is reshaping the public sector’s provision of the physical, information, and human infrastructures that make a society function. Therefore, we need to understand and help support the infrastructuring that different stakeholders do in a digital transformation to make digital infrastructure work. Against this backdrop, we report a two-year action case study of the digitalization of district-heating infrastructure in a Danish municipality. From our engagement in the development and diffusion of smart metering and a personal energy assistant for 39.830 households, we analyze three defining types of infrastructuring in this digital transformation: 1) Digitalizing heat supply metering, 2) Digitalizing consumers’ heating practices, and 3) Digitalizing through partnering. We explain how digital transformation has two-way relationships to the stakeholders’ infrastructuring work and breakdowns that make digital infrastructure visible. Finally, drawing upon the extant research, we discuss how our study contributes to the research on digital transformation in the public sector