Quality aspects of digital forest service management: a case study

Abstract

Forest industry plays a critical role for many remote rural regions in Nordic countries. Despite the increasing number of various digital transformation initiatives, many forestry organizations still use very tra-ditional non-digitalized work practices in harvesting, logging and support operations. Unfortunately, digital transformation is often performed as an ad hoc activity without a holistic approach to ensure ICT quality con-trol. In this paper, we aim to answer the research problem how digital transformation affects the quality of a forest machine operator's opera-tional processes and service systems. A case study research method with a single case structure was used in this study. The main contribution of the paper is to show that digital transformation shall bene t not only the for-est machine operator organization but also their surrounding ecosystem by increasing transparency of operations, reducing travel costs, increasing productivity and creating a more proactive operating model. Both sociological and technical aspects of digital transformation are discussed in the context of forest service management. Additionally, we show that in order to succeed in digital transformation, forestry organizations must pay attention to various quality aspects holistically: hardware quality, software quality, service quality, data quality and process/project quality. IntroductionDigital innovations are changing the way how companies operate their business processes. In forestry, forest machinery utilizes the latest technology compo-nents, such as wireless sensors for counting tree length, Arti cial Intelligence, robotics and high-quality information systems and data network components. However, the rest of the industry operates with traditional working practices that are based on processing large amounts of unstructural data: email, phone calls, SMS messages and messaging apps.Various types of ICT quality issues may result in barriers for digital transformation of forestry processes. Forestry systems may lack well de ned application programming interfaces (APIs), causing poor interoperability and higher integration costs. They may also lack some important features which result in challenges in supporting business processes adequately. Furthermore, these systems were typically not designed to cater needs of the modern data economy and data ecosystems. Thus, there are numerous opportunities for improvement in the forestry domain through digital transformation. This paper extends the study of J¨antti and Aho (2022) by discussing ICT qual-ity aspects of digital transformation in a forest machine operator company and presenting our ndings as a socio-technical system that addresses both sociological and technical dimensions of digital transformation.In order to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), micro-enterprises and startups in digital transformation efforts, some regions have launched Digital Innovation Hubs. Digital Innovation Hubs (DIH) act as one-stop shops that help companies of the region in tackling digi...