Organising and managing digital platform renewal: The role of framing and overflowing

Abstract

Renewing digital platforms is increasingly vital to ensure organisational performance and competitiveness. Managing such renewal is challenging, however, because it requires organisations to remove their exiting digital platform while at the same time building on the practises that depend on it in order to implement a new platform. Unfortunately, the literature offers little guidance on how to launch and manage this inherently complex process. Against this backdrop, we conducted a three-year case study of how a local government organisation organised and managed the renewal of its digital platform, which 4000 health professionals in eldercare use on a daily basis. We use two concepts—framing and overflowing—to reflect the complexity of the process and to describe how it unfolded. Initially, managers used persuasive language to carefully frame a vision of the change and prepare platform users for the renewal process. Despite these framing efforts, however, unexpected events led to overflow situations in which events rendered the framing untenable and threatened successful renewal. This, in turn, led to a decision to postpone the new platform's go-live date. While the postponement did defuse the situation, new overflows emerged, and management was forced to initiate further framing activities to move the platform renewal forward. Based on our insights into these events and extant literature, we present a conceptual model of framing and overflowing in organising and managing digital platform renewal that unpacks how framing–overflowing dynamics play out over time in response to the complexity of the process.