Integrating digital systems to help city residents plan seamless journeys

Many elements of the needed information infrastructure don't exist yet. Will Venters and Ayesha Khanna studied Berlin's prototype

Naps in the office - perhaps the secret of China's digital success?

We have just spent a week visiting Shenzhen, China, to see the headquarters of one of the world’s most innovative and fastest-growing companies – Huawei. Since its founding in 1987, Huawei has grown to become one of the world’s largest telecoms companies, with revenue of $75 billion. Globally it employs 180,000 with nearly 60,000 of these based at the Shenzhen campus

EXPLORING THE RHYTHMS OF INFORMATION INFRASTRUCTURE COORDINATION FOR SMART CITIES: THE CASE OF BUILDING A MOBILITY INFRASTRUCTURE IN BERLIN

This paper investigates how the coordination of information infrastructures (II) emerges as a result of the dialectic between social and material agencies, whose interactions are tempered by both the objective and subjective flows of time. \ \ Drawing upon the theory of the Trichordal Theory of Coordination (Venters et al. 2014), the study explores the process of coordinating the development of particular forms of II associated with Smart Cities. It redirects this theory to the study of strategic niches by including socially constructed temporal rhythms that frame organizational practice (Jackson et al. 2011; Orlikowski & Yates 2002). We show that the development of II projects, such as those undertaken in the creation of smart cities, can be understood through interacting social and material agencies that are embedded in multi-dimensional temporality. \ \ The paper draws upon an in-depth study of the BeMobility project, in which a strategic niche had been created to prototype a sustainable mobility infrastructure in Berlin. The goal of the project was to demonstrate a future in which Berlin will have a multi-modal transport system dominated by electric car-sharing, which is fully integrated into the public transport system. The paper contributes to research on cooperative work in multi-stakeholder II projects for smart cities.

Platform, or technology project? A spectrum of six strategic ‘plays’ from UK government IT initiatives and their implications for policy

There is a markedly broad range of definitions and illustrative examples of the role played by governments themselves within the literature on government platforms. In response we conduct an inductive and deductive qualitative review of the literature to clarify this landscape and so to develop a typology of six definitions of government platforms, organised within three genres along a spectrum from fully centralised, through to fully decentralised. For each platform definition we offer illustrative 'mini-cases' drawn from the UK government experience as well as further insights and implications for each genre drawn from the broader information systems literature on platforms. A range of benefits, risks, governance challenges, policy recommendations, and suggestions for further research are then identified and discussed

Understanding agility in software development through a complex adaptive systems perspective

This paper examines dimensions of social capital in the distributed collaborative development of the UK particle physics Grid. It is shown that the GridPP project effectively draws upon social capital rooted in the tradition and culture of particle physics experiments, characterized with trust, equality, shared vision, collaboration, and pragmatism. These factors contribute to overcoming the challenges in the creation and sharing of knowledge in the development of the Grid, a cutting-edge technology that has to be delivered as a working system with limited time and resources. This case sheds lights on, and provides a good example of, the importance of social capital in distributed systems development

Modularity Archetypes and Their Coexistence in Technological Development: The Case of a Telecoms Company from Analogue Voice to 5G

Modularity is a key concept in the research and practice of information systems. Yet, it has been variously interpreted. Synthesizing the literature, we inductively develop a two-by-two matrix encapsulating two dualities of modularity: architectural vs. governance dimensions, and bottom-up vs. top-down perspectives. This matrix groups the literatures into four archetypical approaches to modularity (Engineering, Ecosystem, Generative and Logical). We next illustrate these archetypes through a qualitative study of a large global telecommunications firm. Drawing upon archival data and interviews, we show how each of these four approaches to modularity become dominant at different times, but also how they overlap and coexist

Epistemic Mirroring: understanding the interdependence between a firm’s governance of internal relations and its interpretation of the digital ecosystem architecture

The mirroring hypothesis asserts a symmetry between how a firm organizes its activities and tasks internally (division of labour) and how technologies are logically partitioned into subcomponents and modules. Yet digital artifacts can violate fundamental properties of physical modular systems, such as the impossibility to univocally allocate functionalities to the various modules, due to their agnostic and generative nature. Although an increasing amount of works is starting to question the usefulness of classic modularity theory to understand how firms take decisions and organize their activities internally, there is still a scant literature on the topic. In this work we draw upon the mirror hypothesis, and complement it with the insight provided by the IT governance literature. By doing so, we suggest that a company’s epistemic interpretation of the modular nature of a digital system depends on the dynamics of its internal decision-making process, reflecting formal and informal patterns of authority among its actors. Our study is evidenced by an extensive case study of the roll-out of an advanced technology by a large global multinational. In this was we study whether, and how, is it possible to establish interdependence between the way in which a firm makes sense of, and resolves, the conflicting goals and objectives of its internal actors and the way in which it interprets and conceives of the architecture of the digital ecosystem it is part of. We term this epistemic mirroring

Collective Digital Innovation: Integrating The Expertise Of Multiple Specialist Stakeholders Including Young Homeless People In The Creation Of Mobile Apps For Social Change

This paper reports on a collaborative action research project which sought to combine the knowledge and expertise of multiple specialist organisations with the understanding and insight of young homeless people in order to find digital ways of supporting them before they became homeless. We discovered that adopting a collective approach to the demands of digital innovation enabled us to develop precise hypotheses and resulted in mobile apps for young people targeted at specific moments of emotional and practical need. The action research project is reflexively analysed in seeking to understand this process of collective digital innovation