We will be welcoming our colleague at ASU, Katie Pine, for our final B2C2 talk for the semester on Wednesday, April 13, at 10:30 Arizona Time (17:30 UTC). Please join us for the informal talk.
Feeding the Machine out of Thin Air: Data Crafting in the ‘Data-Driven’ Organization
Kathleen Pine
(w/ Melissa Mazmanian)
In recent years, a huge amount of excitement has surrounded the rise of innovations in data-driven decision making (DDDM). The promise of DDDM innovations rests on ready availability of high-quality data resources that users can feed into systems to provide decision makers (people or algorithms) high-quality information in service of enhanced decision-making capacity. DDDM systems require pre-packaged data of acceptable quality—i.e. data high in completeness, accuracy, consistency, and validity. In this paper we ask, what conditions cause data resources to lose their integrity, and how do organizations maintain resources of sufficient integrity over time? Emerging from a multi-sited ethnographic study of multiple healthcare organizations, we find that organizations face multiple conditions that usher in breakdowns in data integrity. Further, organizations engage in a complex process to create data resources of acceptable quality on an ongoing basis — what we call “data crafting.” Taking a critical IS perspective and applying a practice theoretic lens, we show that data resources do not have pre-existing characteristics that render them low or high quality. Rather, data quality is always relational with the local configuration of DDDM tools and processes and the organization’s goals in applying analytic attention through data-driven practices.
Kathleen (Katie) H. Pine is an assistant professor in the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University. Pine is an interdisciplinary social scientist working at the intersection of Human Centered Computing (including HCI, CSCW, and health informatics), Organization Science, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Her research centers on data practices: the situated social, technical, and organizational practices through which data are created, managed, and deployed, as well as the social and organizational implications of digital information technologies in the realms of healthcare and community health. She has a doctorate in social ecology from University of California-Irvine and worked previously as a postdoctoral research engineer in the UXR group at Intel Labs, as an assistant project scientist in the Department of Informatics at the University of California-Irvine, and as academic coordinator for the Salton Sea Initiative. Her work has been published in venues including ACM CHI, ACM CSCW, Big Data & Society, and Academy of Management Journal.
Register here: https://bit.ly/b2c2-pine
