EXPERIMENTING WITH DATA: HOW DATA SHAPE, DIRECT, AND SUSTAIN ATTENTION ACROSS MANAGERIAL LEVELS

Digitalization creates a wealth of new datafication data, data that are created in use through digitally mediated processes that can be used to observe, analyze, and optimize this process. Scholars and practitioners are increasingly interested in how such data can be valuable to organizations. Adopting an attention-based view lens, we explore this question by asking how data shape, direct, and sustain attention in strategic decision making. Our 25-month case study of an Innovation Lab where multiple firms that span a supply chain in the heavy manufacturing industry collaborate to experiment with sensor data to innovate maintenance processes shows that data is not per-se valuable. Instead, we see that data have a strategic value in directing strategic problem solving by steering middle and operational managers’ attention and by providing them with something concrete to engage over. This makes two theoretical contributions at the intersection of information systems and strategic management theory: First, this contributes to the attention-based view by showing the importance of middle and operational managers’ attention dynamics for driving digital transformation in industrial organizations. Second, it explores the power of data to remake organizational processes by describing how datafication data guide strategic decision making, where data interpretation focuses attention by engaging managers in-depth with specific problems and solutions, and data observation widens the scope of managers’ attention by opening up analysis for re-evaluation, or moving from one problem or solution to the next.