Digital Technology and Structure

Abstract

Digital technologies are deeply embedded in the social and material world as they are penetrating into products, services, and processes. The confluence of physical and digital materiality, their rapid development, and the emergence of combinatorial innovation pose new challenges for the Information Systems (IS) field. Inspired by Jörg Becker’s famous line “strukturieren, strukturieren, strukturieren” (“to structure, to structure, to structure”), which has influenced many generations of IS students in Münster, in this short essay I discuss how “structure” (the noun) and “to structure” (the verb) are reflected in our research on digital technologies and how they can help us identify some of the challenges involved. Specifically, I discuss research challenges related to (a) the structure of digital technologies, (b) the relationship between digital technologies and structure, and (c) the structures that emerge through the design of digital technologies.