Sustainable Digitalization

Digitalization describes the use of digital technologies to drive transformation of society, private and public organizations and other types of organized practice. Digitalization creates new value producing opportunities and, in line with UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, research is increasingly oriented towards its impact on important societal developments at a global scale as well as locally within countries and regions.

We address two overall aspects of Sustainable Digitalization: First, we explore and contribute to the design and development of digital technologies that support sustainable developments within production, service, healthcare, quality of life, and environmental sustainability, as well as studies of the social impact of digitalization. We mainly engage in projects in Denmark and other Nordic countries. Second, we study how digitalization efforts themselves can sustain in order to make a lasting impact. This include research on user-driven innovation processes and project management, and how this is conditioned by a sustainability agenda.

Our research in Sustainable Digitalization is achieved through Projects, People, Participation and Process, as well as interaction with Praxis. In these efforts we relate to the international research fields: Information Systems, Participatory Design (PD), Design Science Research (DSR), and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

• Projects. We investigate how organizations can improve management of IT projects. In the past we have looked at agile and lean as new principles of organizing. Our long-term goal is to renew project management and develop design principles for sustainable digitalization.
• People. We study people and carry out workplace studies to investigate collaborative and communicative practices in complex organizational settings, for example, healthcare and welfare systems. The long-term goal is to design technologies that better support sustainability of complex collaborative practices.
• Participation. We investigate how to specify and evaluate effects of IT usage and how effects can play a prominent role in IT management and governance. The long-term goal is to conceptualize and develop genuine participatory design methods that ensure sustainable effects of IT designs, infrastructures and usability.
• Process. We investigate how organizations can improve their software development processes. In the past we have taken part in developing ISO 33014, the ImprovAbility model, and a number of Nexus-models e.g. for knowledge transfer in experience groups. Our long-term goal is to renew software process improvement in a sustainable way to include complex, lean and agile processes, as well as the role of user-driven software process improvement.
• Praxis. We interact with Praxis through Action Research, Design Science Research, and Engaged Scholarship to solve real world problems in practice through design, construction, evaluation and reflection on artefacts and how to generate design theories and relevant design principles for later use. Our long-term goal is to establish the methods for engaging with Praxis in a sustainable way as a viable and acknowledged research method for IT related problems and Information Systems research.