Sense-able process innovation in digital health infrastructures

In this paper, we examine the role of IT in enabling and supporting process innovation at a general hospital in Norway. The motivation for our study is that fragmented and heterogeneous components of digital infrastructure in complex organisational settings hamper the ability to monitor and improve organisational performance through process innovation. Prior research indicates that loose couplings between traditional ‘heavyweight IT’ (resilient, secure, and stable) and ‘lightweight IT’ (consumer-oriented, context-aware and flexible) can support innovation. These principles have not been applied to process innovation. Our research question is, how can lightweight IT extend digital infrastructure to support process innovation, in hospital coordinative practices? We use the sense and respond framework from Overby et al. (2006) to analyze our case findings and derive a model for sense-able process innovation with lightweight IT. The model outlines how lightweight IT extends digital (health) infrastructure and affords an organisational ability to continuously sense and respond to the effects of process innovation.