Process Innovation With Lightweight It at an Emergency Unit

Abstract

In this paper, we are studying the role of lightweight IT in process innovation. Our research question is how can lightweight IT support process innovation within an established e-health information infrastructure? Our empirical evidence is a qualitative case study at a primary care emergency service in Oslo. We provide two contributions. First, applying the lens of business process innovation to the literature on information infrastructures, we retain the value of the installed base, while we at the same time ad speed to the implementation project. Second, we demonstrate the role of lightweight technology in improving logistics and message interaction within and between health units. The lightweight technologies availability on the commercial market makes acquisition and implementation faster. Based on this, we briefly suggest a "bypassing strategy" where a new layer of technology is built separately from the existing infrastructure in order to effectively address process innovation efforts.

IT Outside of the IT Department: Reviewing Lightweight IT in Times of Shadow IT and IT Consumerization

“…For an RPA implementation team this was especially bitter as they were not always aware of changes in advance, which lead to unplanned downtime [11]. • Innovation increase, short time to market & lack of security -Several case studies looked at the application of lightweight IT solutions in the context of process innovation [12,16,18,23,26,27,[30][31][32]. Three characteristics of lightweight IT were hereby identified to be especially helpful:…”

“…-Usability and implementation speed, which allows for a fast introduction of the new systems -also based on the ability to bypass the existing infrastructure [23]. -Availability of the solutions on the market and vendors' ability to support pilots, and implementations in an agile way including experimenting, prototyping and testing which leads to short development cycles [26]. -Modular structure and layered architecture that allows for a loose coupling to other system components [16].…”

“…One reason could be the positive focus on solutions and their innovation potential [1]. The benefit collaboration enhancement was not explicitly mentioned, as the focus was rather on organizational level process improvement [26]. The risk lack of continuity appears only with the reverse interpretation that lightweight IT is only used as long as it is beneficial to users and that it grows organically [1].…”

“…Productivity gains and the short time to market are also cited as main benefits of lightweight IT solutions [17]. Lightweight IT has been found to foster especially process innovation and thereby lead to an innovation increase [26]. Depending on the established governance regime lightweight IT can lead to a significant agility enhancement and an increase of flexibility [18].…”