Leveraging Informal Organizational Networks for Successful Digital Transformation

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Digital transformation is a much more complex process than is often recognized. This is because behind headline-grabbing stories of digital advances, digital technologies fundamentally reshape an organization’s relationships with data. Once a firm’s senior leadership decides to “go digital,” as many often describe it, they need to deal with the backend complexity by focusing on the relationship between digital technology, data, and the organization of work. Despite the importance of the role that data collected, stored, and accessed through digital technologies plays in successful digital transformation, we know very little about how certain types of technology use affect and use data in ways that produce changes to the informal organization of work than we do about how to set corporate strategy for digital change. In this study, we begin with the assumption that new digital technologies provide only potential for new ways of organizing and getting work done. To bring about a successful digital transformation, the new data-related capabilities enabled by digital technology must be made into resources that people can actually use. To understand how the transition to digital technologies affects organizations and what how data provided by digital technologies are activated into communication networks, digital transformation needs to be studied both before and after new digital technology implementation. One timely opportunity is the fact that many cities across the country are planning for major initiatives to install several advanced digital technologies to better manage water across their municipalities. We will conduct a multi-year ethnographic study at five municipal water agencies to investigate how data affects tasks, roles and networks before, during and after implementation. We will use both qualitative and quantitative methods to answer the following questions: 1) How do stakeholders within water utilities select and prepare for data-intensive technologies? 2)How do organizations use data from new data-intensive technologies for the work of leak detection, preventative maintenance and disaster preparedness? 3) What effects do digital technologies have on the organization of water utilities regarding tasks, roles and networks within the organization? 4) How does information use compare between different types of departments and different occupational groups? The findings of the study will shape our understanding of what work technology is equipped to do, how organizational members should be trained to work with new digital technologies and the analytic capabilities they require, and how to mitigate unintended consequences of using the digital technologies to guide the work and communication practices in organizations.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.