Extending digital infrastructures : A typology of growth tactics

• Digital infrastructures enable delivery of information services in functional areas such as health, payment, and transportation by providing a sociotechnical foundation for partnership governance, resource reuse, and system integration. To effectively serve emerging possibilities and changing purposes, however, a key question concerns how an infrastructure can be extended to cater for future services in its functional area. In this paper, we approach such digital infrastructure growth as a challenge of aligning new partners whose digital capabilities spur innovative services that attract more users. We advance an initial typology that covers four growth tactics (i.e., adding services, inventing processes, opening identifiers, and providing interfaces) with the potential to set extension of infrastructures in motion. We then explore the proposed typology by investigating the ways in which its particular tactics successfully extended the scope of a digital infrastructure for public transportation in Stockholm, Sweden. Our insights invite IS scholars to engage more deeply in the development of growth tactics that achieve infrastructure extensions necessary for improving the durability of service delivery.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap -- Systemvetenskap, informationssystem och informatik med samhällsvetenskaplig inriktning (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications -- Information Systems, Social aspects (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Annan samhällsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Other Social Sciences (hsv//eng)

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Annan teknik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Other Engineering and Technologies (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Digital Infrastructures

Growth Tactics

Public Transportation

Typology

Information systems

Functional areas

Resource re use

Service delivery

Stockholm

Sweden

System integration

Information services

Digital infrastruktur

utvecklingstaktiker

typologi

transport

tjänsteutveckling

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)