Digital Waste : ELIMINATING NON-VALUE ADDING ACTIVITIES THROUGH DECENTRALIZED APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT

Sammanfattning: In an era where the network of interconnected devices is rapidly expanding, it is difficult for organizations to adapt to the increasingly data-rich and dynamic environment while remaining competitive. Employees experience that much of their time and resources is spent daily on repetitive, inefficient and mundane tasks. Whereas lean manufacturing has manifested itself as a well-known optimization concept, lean information management and the removal of waste is not yet being used to its full potential as its direct value is less visible. A case study was conducted to define which types of non-value adding activities can be identified within information flows and to determine whether decentralized application development can eliminate this digital waste. An internal information flow was modelled, analyzed and optimized by developing customized applications on the Microsoft Power Platform. Based on literature from the field of manufacturing and software development, a framework was developed to categorize digital waste as well as higher order root causes in terms of business strategy and IT infrastructure. While decentralized app development provides the ability to significantly reduce operational digital waste in a simplified manner, it can also enable unnecessary expansion of a common data model and requires application lifecycle management efforts as well as edge security to ensure data compliance and governance. Although limited to one case study, the suggested framework could give insights to organizations that aim to optimize internal workflows by identifying and eliminating digital waste and its root causes.