Information infrastructure

An information infrastructure is defined by Ole Hanseth (2002) as 'a shared, evolving, open, standardized, and heterogeneous installed base' and by Pironti (2006) as all of the people, processes, procedures, tools, facilities, and technology which supports the creation, use, transport, storage, and destruction of information. The notion of information infrastructures, introduced in the 1990s and refined during the following decade, has proven quite fruitful to the information systems (IS) field. It changed the perspective from organizations to networks and from systems to infrastructure, allowing for a global and emergent perspective on information systems. Information infrastructure is a technical structure of an organizational form, an analytical perspective or a semantic network. The concept of information infrastructure (II) was introduced in the early 1990s, first as a political initiative (Gore, 1993 & Bangemann, 1994), later as a more specific concept in IS research. For the IS research community an important inspiration was Hughes′ (1983) accounts of large technical systems, analyzed as socio-technical power structures (Bygstad, 2008).