The Work of Infrastructuring: A Study of a National eHealth Project

Abstract

In this paper we examine a national initiative to further develop the Norwegian healthcare information infrastructure. Specifically, we analyse the work of a project team engaged in the design and development of new web-based capabilities for communication between citizens and primary healthcare practitioners. We foreground the work of infrastructuring which entails conceptualising new technological capabilities not as standalone objects, but as elements in larger arrangements that are sociotechnical in nature. Our findings show how the work within the project was shaped by concerns for embeddedness and durability that led to certain design decisions. Furthermore, we find that these decisions had significant repercussions on the development process and created a complex situation where the cooperation of an evolving constellation of multiple actors was required. Our research contributes an initial understanding of how an infrastructural project is different to projects aimed to the development of specific software artefacts.