Within the Time Machine: the Role of Organizational Temporalities in Shaping Digital Transformation Within Public Sector Organizations in Saudi Arabia

EasyChair Preprint no. 10945

Abstract

The Information systems (IS) literature has discussed time in some detail, including how IT enables the bridging of problems associated with temporal distance in IT-mediated teams, facilitating teams’ decision-making process, speeding up business processes as well as stretching time through enabling actors to multitask by utilizing IT artefacts. However, there has been a tendency to focus only on time as a linear objective construct, thus neglecting its subjective and socially constructed ontology of time. In this paper, we argue that this temporal ontology deserves more attention in IS literature. To examine the interplay of objective and subjective views of time whilst undergoing digital transformation and its effects and outcomes, a qualitative, comparative case study approach is embraced here to understand how Saudi governmental organizations are implementing a new government initiative to digitally transforming with time. In this context, we explore how key actors act upon objective and subjective temporalities during the Saudi country-wide transformation of the digital economy, their conflicts, their mechanisms to go about the conflicts, and the role their different logics and underneath temporalities play in orchestrating the transformation. We take advantage of a countrywide imposed transformation of Saudi Vision2030 which is an underexplored context.

Keyphrases: Digital Transformation, Government, public organizations, temporalities

@Booklet{EasyChair:10945,
  author = {Yasmeen Aldhafiri},
  title = {Within the Time Machine: the Role of Organizational Temporalities in Shaping Digital Transformation Within Public Sector Organizations in Saudi Arabia},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 10945},

  year = {EasyChair, 2023}}