Digital Tactics: Resolving Emerging Socio-technical Tensions in the Digital Workplace

Knowledge professionals are increasingly facing various tensions in their digital workplace brought by emerging lightweight IT and existent heavyweight IT and the processes and practices they support and enable. In this paper, we uncover five digital tactics, which knowledge professionals utilize daily to resolve these tensions when carrying out and ameliorating their productivity and well-being at work. While existent IS-research recognizes these socio-technical tensions as an IS-strategic phenomenon that managers resolve by deploying various strategic responses, we illuminate how digital tactics on individual, employee level is an equally important element in resolving these tensions and reaching strategic goals during digital transformation. Based on data from group interviews with 22 knowledge professionals, we abstracted five different digital tactics of improvisation, accountability, maneuvering, fostering a both/and culture and acceleration, that employees adopt to resolve tensions. Going forward, we suggest broadening our understanding of the socio-technical realm with the concept of digital tactics.