Walking a Tightrope: Managing Paradoxes and Tensions between Care Taking and Efficiency during IT-enabled Organizational Transformation in Hospital Group

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The talk will present a case study on the establishment of a centralized medical logistics hub for a group of German hospitals. Centralizing the pharmacy and outsourcing warehousing and distribution to a logistics provider has been done in response to economic pressures. The study tries to reconstruct the organizational transformation and highlights the role of management in accommodating the tensions caused by the conflicting logics of care taking and efficiency. It shows how management has translated regulatory constraints into accepted rules and mechanisms that facilitate quality of care and productivity at the same time.

In order to understand the organization of the hospital group we have conceptualized it as a constellation of distinct, yet related and partly overlapping communities of practice (CoP). We reflect the transformation as changes in the constellation of communities of practice.

While IT does not feature prominently in our case and analysis, it is an important and unquestioned part of the solution. Information systems have become embedded in the daily routines of the various communities. They are perceived as part of the infrastructure and have de facto moved into the background.

Brief Bio Dr Stefan klein:
From 2008-2010 he was Dean of the Munster School of Business and Economics. Current research areas are Information Infrastructures, Network Economy, Information Management, Social Media and the transformation of work. In particular, he studies practices of technology use and organizational transformation from a group to an industry level. He takes a particular interest in health care and tourism.