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The digital infrastructure literature provides important perspectives on the intrinsic relations between information systems in today’s organisations. However, little attention has been paid to the challenges involved in providing requisite digital infrastructure services to organisations. In this paper, we argue digital infrastructure service providers operate in highly complex and uncertain environments. Rather than adopting a traditional approach to control, providers must therefore continuously negotiate a balance between control and drift as two complementary strategies. Our argument is based on a retrospective longitudinal case study of a Swedish infrastructure service team within a large international firm. Using the encounter-episode process model as structuring principle and focusing on the tension between control and drift, we analyse the evolution of the provider’s efforts to manage a portfolio of digital infrastructure services over a period of ten years. Based on these analyses, we uncover the involved complexities and dynamics, how control efforts and drift were constituted and how the infrastructure services were managed by continuously balancing control and drift. In conclusion, we relate the findings to extant literature to discuss new insights into provider management of digital infrastructure services.

Information systems development (ISD) has been part of the core of information systems for over 40 years. Throughout its history, the issue of risk has been closely related to ISD projects, and significant efforts have been made by researchers and practitioners to improve their quality. While important headway has been made in assessing and resolving ISD risk, the literature shows that new and salient risks emerge outside the scope of extant risk management regimes. As a consequence, organizations still struggle with leveraging new tech- nology as projects continue to fail at almost the same rate, albeit for different reasons. Understood as the distinction between reality and possibility, risk is inherently intertwined with practice and rooted in the knowledge, goals, power, and values of specific actors in particular contexts. Hence, to understand how risks emerge, we present a longitudinal case study in which we trace the origin and locus of risks in contemporary ISD practices. We draw on these insights to theorize information technology risk as increasingly inter- stitial, originating from sources positioned in between established practices and therefore outside the scope of conventional risk anal- yses. In conclusion, we discuss interstitial risks as an important form of emergent risk with implications for both research and practice.

In a day and age when contemporary businesses are transformed, driven by a service-dominance logic and dependent upon IT, we need to understand how firms cope with technological adaptations and how such technological adaptations can lead to service adaptations. Drawing on a framework on technological transitions and an interpretive longitudinal case study of the services provided by a team within a large public IT firm, this article addresses the following questions：How do service transitions come about? Can we distinguish particular patterns in service transition processes? This research unveils how technological and social dimensions mutually constitute each other within development and implementation of service provisioning. The findings show how：(a) IT plays a fundamental role in service provisioning; (b) technological transitions are the necessary but insufficient preconditions for service transitions; and (c) there are attenuation effects when it comes to the move from technology transition to service transition.

To survive and prosper in a networked economy, organizations must learn how to act as part of a wider value network. Key firm capabilities are thus the positioning in a value network and the providing of services that are attractive for the market. In this article I report from a longitudinal study targeting a team that has been forced to handle a re-positioning within its value network. The team started out developing a software, tailor-made for each customer, but development have taken them to various positions and delivery context creating challenges for the team to tackle. As contributions, this research has the goal of providing new theoretical insights about the challenges involved in managing information infrastructure services from various positions in a value chain, how information gaps in value chains emerge as a result of an increased distance between service provider and customer, and how such gaps can be solved.

Failure to understand, identify, and manage risk is often cited as a major cause of IT problems. While the project is the preferred level of analysis in most IT risk management research, IT is becoming increasingly infrastructural, and there is therefore a need to adapt risk strategies beyond the project level. In this paper, we explore how risk management practices in a successful IT service provider group emerged over time as the group coped with infrastructural dynamics and complexities. Drawing on Orlikowski's practice lens, we investigate actual practices and possible options related to risk management as rapid technological and organizational changes resulted in increased infrastructure management challenges for the IT service provider. Our research contributes to the IT risk management literature by applying risk theory to service management in the infrastructural domain and by moving beyond the project as level of analysis.

This paper describes the efforts in ensuring research relevance by means of an industrial PhD project. The project is aiming at strengthening the relevance of research and development by educating scientists with an insight into the practical aspects of research and development and by developing networks in which knowledge can be effectively disseminated between industry and university. The project is taking its stand with an empirical and industrial centre with a technical solution called Dynamo, which is delivered by the company Logica. Dynamo, an intelligent portal that seamlessly connects systems, user information, roles and rule sets, and its context will provide a rich and useful empirical source from which to launch the action research process. The project contains two distinct stakeholders – industry and academy – jointly guiding the project and making sure that both worlds get a result that is in line with and contributes to their business. To this end two key stakeholders that have taken on the role as gatekeepers of rigor and relevance respectively. Taking position in the middle of the action is the PhD student who, by living the life of both researcher and consultant, will take on the role of balancing rigor and relevance. The chosen research approach together with the complex implementation context together with makes it crucial to take on an open minded selection.

Contemporary organizations are increasingly dependent on information infrastructures to deliver their services. However, information infrastructures are highly complex and dynamic, which lead to considerable management challenges. This research aims to contribute to our understanding of these challenges through an in-depth investigation of a team responsible for information infrastructure services at a large business and technology service company. The complexity and dynamics faced by the team emphasizes the important role of context in managing its information infrastructure services and underlying technology platform. To investigate the team’s practice we therefore adopt contextualist inquiry in combination with a pluralist approach based on four complementary theoretical lenses; technological frames of references, risk management, control versus drift, and dynamic capabilities. As contributions, this research has the dual goal to improve the teams’ practices while at the same time providing new theoretical insights about the role of context in management of information infrastructure services.

The quality of medical services is decreasing in several countries. In Sweden reductions have been made in the allocation of resources to medical services, with the result that the pressure on those people working in this sector increases, which in turn leads to stress and burn-out in medical staff. Alongside the demands for savings and greater efficiency in home care, the number of people in need of care in their home environment increases - a fact which puts even more pressure on the people working in this sector. Treating patients in their home is a good solution for all parties involved around a patient, and many patients, especially patients within palliative care and patients suffering from multiple illness, prefer being treated at home instead of being hospitalised. Treatment in an environment in which they feel more comfortable can make the patient feel more relaxed and secure - a state of mind that is considered important in order to advance recovery. To facilitate collaboration between different caring units there is a great need to have access to the right information at the right time. The home care team's work demands a way to access and update information while mobile. The solution will have to be adaptive to the mobile character of the home care teams’ work, i.e. the amount of information as well as the type of information communicated and distributed has to be adjustable to the bandwidth and presentation means available at the team’s current position. Today, at least here in Sweden, most units/organisations and different professions within a unit have their own system to store information. These systems are not compatible because of different definitions of concepts, among other reasons. A result of this is that it is not possible to exchange information between different units and/or professions. One important aspect of the collaboration between different units/organisations and professionals, especially within home care, is the understanding of how the collaboration is to be conducted between the different parties. This paper describes the result of a pilot study conducted at two different locations in Sweden. The aim of the study was to investigate the concept of collaboration in home care and get some suggestions about improving the weak links of collaboration. The respondents were chosen from three categories of people; patients/relatives, nursing staff, and management. The focus is on the collaboration conducted between these different people involved in the Proceedings of the 10thInternational Symposium on Health Information Management Research – iSHIMR 2005 2 care situation as well as their view of how collaboration could and should be handled. The results from the pilot study show that several collaboration problems exist, both between the different care giving organisations/groups as well as within groups.

When we humans are dealing with complex things in our daily lives, for example an artifact, we tend to ascribe different characters to it. This is our way of getting a quick overview of the artifact and makes it understandable to us. The ascribing of character is not based on thorough examination of the object at hand though, but rather on a certain thing, i.e. a characteristic that catches our attention. This characteristic gives us a certain feeling about the artifact and makes it possible for us to make a judgment about it, even if it is a snap one. With this as a starting point we try to identify the different characteristics, which constitute the overall character, i.e. realism. In many visualisations with this objective, realism is juxtaposed with copying static structures, i.e. buildings and streets. This is also a strong contributor to the realism character in the Botnia-track visualisation. In our opinion this is not enough to get a realistic character. We have identified a few other prominent characteristics that also are important contributors to the realism character, for example landmarks, sound, moving objects and narrator voice. Our main conclusion is that if a realistic character is desirable, more than visualisation of static structures is necessary. We found at least five additional characteristics that influence people’s perception of a virtualisation; landmarks, sound, moving objects and narrator voice. In our opinion, all of these are important for a realistic character to emerge and something that designers have to take in to consideration to reach the intended goal.