Assembling a national health information infrastructure: The case of Vietnam

Abstract

Digital infrastructure development and evolution is a topic that has gained increasing interests from researchers, practitioners, and policy makers. Conceptualized as a large scale system transcending boundary of single organisation and involving multiple stakeholders, the evolutionary trajectory of information infrastructure is contingent, unpredictable, and in many cases end up in the so called drifting status quo. Some researchers believe such systems could not be designed but instead should be "cultivated", a term referring to the process of incremental build and upon something rather than at once and from scratch. This paper explored the four dimensional concept of "architectural knowledge" proposed by Andersson et al. (2008) with the aim to identify additional approaches to cultivation. Using empirical data from a longitudinal and action research project that lasted three years from 2012 to 2014 in building the health information infrastructure in Vietnam, we found out that architectural knowledge could be a powerful lens in understanding generative mechanisms of information infrastructure.