Digital Organizational Resilience: A History of Denmark as a Most Digitalized Country

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how digital organizational resilience was a key to digital transformation success in the public sector of Denmark. Using a historical research method, we analyze the IS history from 1998-2019 at all three levels of the public sector in Denmark. This study finds historical events about barriers and hindrances and shows how resilience enabled continuity in the transformation. We find a pattern of three elements in the history of what constitutes digital organizational resilience in e-government: digitalization strategy, collaboration across the public sector, and the ability to learn from overcoming barriers and hindrances. Digital resilience has previously been studied in the context of individual learning and cyber security. This pattern is a promising basis for understanding and achieving resilience in a transformative digitali-zation strategy in the public sector.