While witnessing rapid advancements in digital technologies, we persistently struggle with realising the benefits of such technologies in public sector digitalisation, Li and Kempton said.
"Many large and ambitious IT projects fail and most public sector organisations remain far from the envisioned goals of utilising digital technologies to offer improved and more efficient services."
In their research, they have explored why public sector digitalisation remains so difficult. Li and Kempton argued how part of the issue relates to a deeply rooted misconception of digitalisation as technical problem-solving. This misconception leads us to apply the same problem-solving methods that we use for technical problems in IT development to the unstructured and “wicked” problems of organisational improvement, they argued.
At the end of their talk Li and Kempton presented some suggestions for what they consider a more fruitful understanding of digitalisation and the implications this has for further research and practice.
See video recording from the talk
Interested in this topic?
We recommend reading this conference paper "Challenging the “IS” in ISD: From Software to Sociotechnical Systems Design and Development".
Download Li and Kempton's presentation here.
About the speakers
Magnus Li is a Postdoc in Information Systems at the Department of Informatics, at the University of Oslo. His research interest is in how we can improve digital innovation and digitalization processes with a particular focus on larger public sector organizations. He engages in empirical research in the Norwegian public sector and African and Asian countries within the HISP network.
Alexander Kempton is an Associate Professor in Information Systems at the Department of Informatics, at the University of Oslo. He is a qualitative researcher of socio-technical systems, with a professional background from both digitalization processes and software development. In his research, he primarily studies digitalization projects and digital transformation within healthcare and the public sector.
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