4. Governing Is in the Details—The Longitudinal Impact of IT-related Policy Management for Public Boards

Decision makers increasingly enforce policies of digitalization of everyday activities. The aim of this study is to examine, at the micro level, the practices and their impact of people transforming the way they conduct their public board work due to an IT-related policy decision. We argue for analysis of the seemingly small, slow, yet fundamental interactions with which humans shape and reinvent organizational life. Our approach provides insights into the impact of implementation of policy decisions and how change of seemingly mundane activities creates the evolution of new structures and practices of importance. Our study highlights a reconstitution of routines and change of anchoring practices of a public board that (a) anchors new material to a board member’s responsibilities without utilizing its inherent advantages, (b) anchors new conflicting routines while abandoning well established ones, and (c) results in new routines that weaken fundamental goals of the board member’s role and work counterproductive to human cognition.