Please scroll down for article-it is on subsequent pagesWith 12,500 members from nearly 90 countries, INFORMS is the largest international association of operations research (O.R.) and analytics professionals and students. INFORMS provides unique networking and learning opportunities for individual professionals, and organizations of all types and sizes, to better understand and use O.R. and analytics tools and methods to transform strategic visions and achieve better outcomes. For more information on INFORMS, its publications, membership, or meetings visit Abstract. In the last few years, leading-edge research from information systems, strategic management, and economics have separately informed our understanding of platforms and infrastructures in the digital age. Our motivation for undertaking this special issue rests in the conviction that it is significant to discuss platforms and infrastructures concomitantly, while enabling knowledge from diverse disciplines to cross-pollinate to address critical, pressing policy challenges and inform strategic thinking across both social and business spheres. In this editorial, we review key insights from the literature on digital infrastructures and platforms, present emerging research themes, highlight the contributions developed from each of the six articles in this special issue, and conclude with suggestions for further research.
I n this paper, we examine the challenges around the development and scalability of information infrastructures. We identify two possible solutions proposed in the literature, one emphasizing more top-down control and the need for a clear IT governance framework, and a second arguing for a more flexible approach since absolute control is impossible and only leads to drift and unintended outcomes. We suggest that there is a clear gap in the literature in better understanding how to govern the development of information infrastructures using a bottom-up approach. We build on research that approaches IS development as a collective action problem and focus on how different actors frame the infrastructure as a public and private good, and how the framing process is underpinned by actors' different ideologies. We use our theoretical approach to examine the framing of the development of a regional health information infrastructure in Crete. Our analysis examines how different actors frame the infrastructure as a collective action good and explore their ideological positioning. We explore the struggle around meanings attributed to the good over time as being a public or private one in establishing or sustaining relations of power, and how legitimacy is challenged or reinforced. Finally, we develop contributions on the collective action challenges in infrastructure development and suggest how a polycentric approach to governance might be further developed to promote the ongoing cultivation of information infrastructures from the bottom up.
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