Yes / ‘Digital Era Governance’ (DEG) enables electronic networked processes for integrated, holistic public sector delivery through the adoption of contemporary digital technologies. Our study, based within the States of California and Nevada (USA), investigates the logics embedded in DEG and the critical issues involved for transformational change. We draw upon the concept of ‘enactment’ as a lens to provide insights into relevant theoretical issues. These are operationalised through an enhanced Technology Enactment Framework (TEF) to consider reforms to explore the new DEG environment and, specifically, the role of the CIO and e-government policies. Our findings reveal how public sector CIOs adopt the role of an ‘institutional entrepreneur’, who demonstrate a series of initiatives augmented through identified behaviours relating to proactive community mobilisation (leadership, member focus) and legitimisation (discourse, success stories). Furthermore, the characterisation of entrepreneurial enactment appears to be extremely beneficial to the transformation to DEG within any contemporary public sector context.

The public sector, particularly healthcare organisations are under ever increasing pressure to do more with less. This coupled with the need to keep up to the constant technological changes and ever increasing abundance of information has led to many public sector organisations adopting Business Intelligence (BI) in order to leverage business value and improve decision-making. However, many organisations such as the National Health Service (NHS) continue to fail in their Information Technology (IT) related initiatives. While the rise of BI and its growing influence in organisations has attracted much academic attention, this has largely been from architectural, design and technological perspectives, whilst little is known about how BI is used by various organisational actors to reach decisions, nor much is understood regarding its resulting impact on organisational power dynamics. Thus, there remains an under researched area of discussion in the literature from the perspective of BI users. While studies report how BI can impact organisational effectiveness, facilitate data driven decision making and supposedly overcome intuitive decision making, the extent to which BI impacts and alters power dynamics between organisational actors across the organisation has received little attention. Accordingly, this research adopts a qualitative case study approach to explore power resulting from BI use within a large NHS trust by conducting 30 semi-structured interviews consisting of operational managers and BI analysts. Through taking a human-centric approach, this research uncovers how BI is altering power dynamics between organisational actors, whereby BI analysts are becoming increasingly influential as a result of their analytical skills. It was found that operational managers are becoming more reliant upon data analysts, resulting in the analysts having more and more influence. However, this research finds it is only when the analysts supplement their technical skill-set with their institutional knowledge, that they have the ability to influence and enact power within the organisational settings. The research also offers insights into the contestations and conflicts which arise from the use of BI, between operational managers and analysts as well as between in-house analysts, based in the operation setting and the centralised analysts, operating across the entire trust. Accordingly, this research empirically validates a BI Power Enactment Framework and proposes the BI Power Matrix, which may assist policy makers in identifying determining key factors which are contributory to the success or failure of technological initiatives.

<p>This thesis examines <em>dynamic IT capabilities:</em> firms’ abilities to integrate, build, and reconfigure information technology resources concurrently with organizational business process and managerial processes in pursuit of performance advantages in a changing or uncertain environment. Research in dynamic IT capabilities has increased with the recognition that organizational survival and growth requires organizational change to resolve a range of management challenges that emerge over time. In prior research, specific constructs of dynamic IT capabilities have been the subject of independent empirical investigation. This has resulted in conflicting conceptualizations of dynamic capabilities that obfuscate theoretical definition, empirical grounding and measurement. We seek to contribute conceptual coherence to the discourse on dynamic IT capabilities in three respects. First, we advance a theoretical framework to tease apart the common versus idiosyncratic elements of firms’ dynamic capabilities to <em>exploit</em> IT in practice. Our empirical findings serve to integrate conflicting (common versus idiosyncratic) conceptualizations of dynamic IT capabilities. Second, we advance a theoretical framework of firms’ dynamic capabilities to <em>explore</em> for IT innovations that are likely to improve firm performance. To that end we examine CIOs’ use of external advice networks to mindfully identify rewarding IT innovations. In so doing we clarify the concept of mindfulness. We find mindful external advice seeking is atypical in practice, contrary to assumptions of the technology diffusion and institutional literatures. Our empirical findings elucidate the significance of IT governance in motivating mindful search for rewarding IT innovations. Third, we demonstrate the importance of qualitative and configurational methodologies in investigating such complex phenomena as dynamic IT capabilities. We also propose promising future research directions, theoretical grounding and analytical techniques that, by building on the concepts advanced in this study, can further advance our understanding of how firms acquire and realize dynamic IT capabilities in support of sustained performance advantages.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)