Relevant for students from DIGHEL or DESIGN.
With digitalization, we aim to improve organizations with the opportunities we have with digital technologies. Digitalization does not only involve technology design, development, and innovation. It consists in shaping, redefining, and innovating organizational arrangements such as routines, practices, standards, roles, services, and value propositions according to the novel opportunities that lie in digital technologies. Meanwhile, many digitalization projects and the project management and systems development methods we use remain technology-oriented (they focus on the design and development of IT, not the joint design of the organization and IT). In the DHIS2 Design Lab, we explore how we can strengthen methods and practice for what we call sociotechnical systems design - the joint design of IT and organizational arrangements. The aim is to strengthen the way we organize digitalization and digital innovation processes, particularly in public sector projects and primarily within health. We look for highly motivated master’s students who want to participate in our work.
Under our broader research agenda, students have significant room for defining their own specific topic based on their interests.
Relevant questions and aspects to explore include:
- What activities do successful digitalization and sociotechnical systems design processes involve?
- How do we evaluate organizational effects of technological interventions and how can learnings from these evaluations feed into iterative cycles of design and implementation?
- How can we use systems thinking and systemic design to identify innovative interventions and assess their potential organizational impact?
- Aspects related to digitalization project management (e.g., how do we organize innovative procurement, control, mandates, scopes, etc. to offer a fruitful environment for sociotechnical systems design and innovation)
- What is a sociotechnical systems designer or digitalization expert, and how can we build such capacity in IT consultancies?
- How can IT consultancies assess their current practices to identify how they can strengthen their capacity in digitalization?
Students may bring their own case from the Norwegian context, or they can be included in some of our ongoing projects within the HISP network and the DHIS2 ecosystem where we collaborate with IT professionals and client organizations in about 100 countries in Africa, Asia, and South America. The design lab has ongoing collaborations with IT professionals in Rwanda, Tanzania, Malawi, Kenya, and Mozambique. Within HISP, students may be part of real, ongoing projects and contribute significantly on a practical level while developing knowledge of relevance to digitalization more generally. Students can partake in our ongoing development of methods, guidelines, and educational material for digitalization professionals within HISP and beyond.
Do not hesitate to contact me for an open chat about opportunities.