Service Innovation within Healthcare Domain; LEgacy Systems Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is recognized to make a profound impact on the current status quo within the complex healthcare domain. Digital transformation initiatives within IT software and service healthcare projects have been identified as challenging. The challenges recognized are related to communication, wrong assumptions, or perceived impressions about needs and pain points between IT service providers and IT service consumers. However, the challenge is two toothed. Both IT service providers and IT service consumers are affected. Even though IT firms recognize the challenges, they usually do not consider spending time on developing a digital transformation strategy in collaboration with the service consumer. Neither are they considering incorporating different design disciplines methods and frameworks into the day-to-day used software engineering Agile approach. Nevertheless, those IT firms encompassing design thinking can secure that perceived assumptions about customers’ needs and pain points are in line with business strategy. In this thesis, we studied a well-established Italian IT firm’s Legacy business on-going service innovation project in the form of a joint action research design and interpretative ethnography single case study to understand the barriers the firm have towards the digital transformation of their Legacy systems, and the transition towards becoming an IT service-oriented software engineering firm. Our primary focus is business design, and the interconnection between design, design thinking and development disciplines through the literature review. In addition, the study explores potential challenges in creating a sustainable and attractive service. The on-going project seeks to offer mid-manager and executives within the nursing home, and territorial care a new B2B cloud-based and data-driven Business Intelligence service combined of three dimensions (administrative, financial, and medical) with a “global approach”, as well as fostering mid-manager and executives adopting new work policies. This thesis's outcome sheds new light on business design discipline and design thinking approach capabilities facilitating IT service-oriented software engineering firms' digital transformation initiatives