Transforming Information Management in Aerospace: A Qualitative study about Key Factors and Challenges in Digital Transformation
2025 (English)Independent thesis Advanced level (degree of Master (One Year)), 10 credits / 15 HE credits
Student thesis
Abstract [en]
Digital transformation has become a strategic necessity across industries, yet organizations in safety critical sectors such as aerospace face unique information‐management challenges under stringent regulatory and technical constraints. This thesis investigates how a Swedish aerospace company navigates these challenges by identifying the key factors driving transformation and the socio‐technical challenges that obstruct it.
A qualitative, socio-technical systems (STS) approach was adopted, using semi-structured interviews with seven participants from key areas specific for this project. Analysis followed grounded thematic coding, mapping responses onto STS principles of joint optimization between social subsystems such as people, roles, culture and technical subsystems such as tools, processes, infrastructure.
The study uncovered four key factors, a clear strategy with informed decision making to guide each transformation phase, common standards for document types and metadata to promote consistency, visible leadership support through resource allocation and tailored training and pull-based adoption driven by engaged super-users. Six challenges were also identified, absence of permanent data governance and enterprise architecture frameworks, misaligned leadership understanding, pushback and change resistance, persistent knowledge gaps, legacy platform constraints, and integration and interoperability failures that force manual workarounds.
To address these issues, six socio-technical interventions are proposed, appointing an Enterprise Architect and Information Stewards to sustain governance, delivering conceptual education on digital threads and traceability, formalizing pull-based adoption, embedding user-centred design, providing role based end-user training and implementing needs-driven solution design with precise requirements before tool selection.
These findings advance digital transformation and STS theory by highlighting conceptual education as a boundary spanning lever, refining pull-based adoption in regulated contexts, and underscoring communication’s role in maintaining feedback loops.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2025. , p. 54
Keywords [en]
Digital transformation, information management, aerospace, socio-technical systems, data governance, Enterprise Architecture
National Category
Information Systems, Social aspects
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:hv:diva-24059Local ID: EXI802OAI: oai:DiVA.org:hv-24059DiVA, id: diva2:1993173
Subject / course
Informatics
Educational program
IT och verksamhetsutveckling
Supervisors
Examiners
2025-09-032025-08-292025-09-30Bibliographically approved