Cultivating Data Practices Across Boundaries: How Organizations Become Data-driven

In this paper, we analyze the efforts of a public healthcare business intelligence unit to implement and disseminate their data products and thus make the healthcare organization more data-driven. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork in a healthcare business intelligence unit (the BIU) whose mission is to improve healthcare efficiency and quality by making data and data analyses available to healthcare managers and staff. Their primary products consist of a data warehouse and Data Reports, both providing curated and daily updated data for healthcare staff to analyze and visualize. We conceptualize these Data Reports and the data warehouse as boundary objects through which cooperation around data between various users is achieved. Our focus is on the BIU’s efforts to introduce and promote the use of boundary objects to healthcare staff while providing them with the competencies to use them in practice. Efforts that we conceptualize as collaborative boundary work through which a new joint field of working with data is created between the BIU and healthcare staff. Based on the analysis of the ethnographic fieldwork, we point to three important aspects in creating this new joint field: Mobilizing interest, building local capabilities, and propagating data locally. The paper makes three contributions: It adds to our understanding of how new joint fields can be cultivated through collaborative boundary work to make healthcare data-driven; it contributes to the emergent field of data work studies; and finally, it adds to the largely normative literature on business intelligence and self-service business intelligence through an ethnographic analysis of its efforts to make healthcare data-driven.