How working digitally during the Covid-19 pandemic does not help to transform the public sector: a digital organisational ethnography

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced many public organisations to work fully digitally, which is seen by some as the ideal chance for public organisations to engage in digital transformation. Large-scale organisational change is needed for digital transformation to revise core organisational processes with technology. Using a social constructivist lens to study how technologies used for working digitally are enacted in organisations, this study aims to see to what extent working digitally during the Covid-19 pandemic helps to transform the public sector. A digital organisational ethnography was conducted in a Dutch province in which people were followed for several months to study their use of technology in practice. The results show that working digitally leads to maintenance and reinforcement of existing bureaucratic structures and leads to a lack of richness in communication that is harmful to organisational change. People enact technologies to continue their existing ways of working instead of using technologies for change. This suggests that working digitally does not help to transform the public sector and can even be harmful to digital transformation. More attention should be paid towards material aspects of technology as organisations will most likely choose technologies that fit the organisation they are now instead of the digitally transformed organisation they might want to become.