The Role of Context in Managing Information Infrastructure Services

Contemporary organizations are increasingly dependent on information infrastructures to deliver their services. However, information infrastructures are highly complex and dynamic, which lead to considerable management challenges. This research aims to contribute to our understanding of these challenges through an in-depth investigation of a team responsible for information infrastructure services at a large business and technology service company. The complexity and dynamics faced by the team emphasizes the important role of context in managing its information infrastructure services and underlying technology platform. To investigate the team’s practice we therefore adopt contextualist inquiry in combination with a pluralist approach based on four complementary theoretical lenses; technological frames of references, risk management, control versus drift, and dynamic capabilities. As contributions, this research has the dual goal to improve the teams’ practices while at the same time providing new theoretical insights about the role of context in management of information infrastructure services.