Abstract
Adopting emerging technologies drive the digital transformation of public sector organisations. This is often challenging because of slow and formal public procurement process and the need to collaborate among various actors. When adopting emerging technology, the requirements of the system aren’t always known in advance. The existing research has identified these barriers and presented singular solutions to them, but there is a gap in understanding what the process of adopting emerging technologies is. To fill this gap, this paper draws from the boundary spanning literature and explores the process and the boundary spanning activities between different actors in a case project of a large Finnish city, which was adopting contactless payment system for elementary schools. By examining the boundary spanning activities and actors, a framework was developed for understanding the process driving successful adoption of emerging technology in public sector organisation. The findings demonstrate the importance of iterative piloting process of the emerging technologies and the importance of the boundary spanning activities to coordinate the process. The paper contributes to the literature on the digital transformation and to the boundary spanning literature by providing a detailed understanding of the piloting process with boundary spanning activities in a specific organisational context.
Recommended Citation
Paavola, Risto, "Adopting Emerging Technology in Public Sector: A Case of the Contactless Payment System for Pupils in Elementary Schools" (2019). 10th Scandinavian Conference on Information Systems. 5.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/scis2019/5