The long road to data-driven decision-making: how do casework registrations become management information?

The implementation of digital technologies in organisations is often
seen as a means by which to ease the administrative burden, create
transparency, and to provide for better management information.
Based on in-depth interviews with social workers, admin staff, and managers
from eleven Danish municipal disability offices, this paper shows
the nuances of the perceptions and ambitions to make management and
welfare organisations data-driven. The article maps the infrastructures
making management information possible. When social workers insert
data in digital case management systems (CMS) on clients, services, and
service costs, it becomes possible to extract this data and use it as management
information. However, achieving this requires much more
than a few clicks of a mouse. In fact, there is quite a lot of invisible work
performed by the admin staff. The paper demonstrates how information
on cost data and case overview travels and transforms within an organisational
hierarchy. The analysis shows that the human impact is not
out of the equation, even though some performance information is automatically
aggregated. Performance information is indeed a result of
cooperation between man and machine. Seeing as information is not a
neutral raw material to be easily transported challenges the belief in
data-driven organisations as a pure technical matter.