Ambidextrous IT Governance Enactment in Healthcare: A Comparison between the Swedish and Ugandan Setting

Abstract

IT Governance is advocated as a necessary prerequisite for effective digitalization by research and practice alike. Despite this, there are but few studies of IT Governance in the healthcare sector, and even fewer on the enactment of IT Governance. This paper reports on a comparative case study of a Swedish and Ugandan setting on the enactment of ambidextrous IT governance within healthcare. Ambidextrous IT Governance is perceived as governance designed to balance targets of efficiency and innovation, and the study is informed by the resource orchestration logic. The findings show a set of challenges and opportunities in both settings such as complexity in the sharing of information in the Swedish setting and the possibility to leapfrog in the Ugandan. Furthermore, the ambidextrous balancing point and aspired shift differed significantly between the two settings, where the Ugandan setting wanted to rebalance toward exploitation and the Swedish setting toward exploration. The paper concludes with a discussion and a call for future research on ambidextrous IT Governance.