Digital contact-tracing adoption in the COVID-19 pandemic: IT governance for collective action at the societal level

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a need for rapid, population-wide digital contact tracing. One solution, Bluetooth-enabled digital proximity tracing using smartphones, promises to preserve individual privacy while helping to contain society-wide viral outbreaks. However, this digital solution works effectively only if adopted by the majority of the population. This poses a collective action problem: everyone would benefit from wide-spread proximity tracing, but the benefits for the individual are indirect and limited. To facilitate such collective action at the societal level, this paper conceptualises the option space of IT governance actions for proximity tracing adoption along two dimensions: decision-making entities (who will govern the roll-out) and accountability enforcement (how strictly will adoption and use be enforced). Examining coherent governance approaches that arise from the framework, we show that there are no globally ideal approaches but only locally contextualised ones that depend on immediate health risk, prior experience with pandemics, societal values and national culture, role of government, trust in government and trust in technology in each society. The paper contributes specific propositions for governing digital contact tracing in the COVID-19 pandemic and general theoretical implications for IT governance for collective action at the societal level.

SPECIAL ISSUE EDITORS:

• Pär Ågerfalk, Kieran Conboy and Michael Myers

KEYWORDS:

• IT governance
• collective action
• digital contact tracing
• proximity tracing
• COVID-19
• pandemics

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Editors of the EJIS Special Communications on IS in the Age of Pandemics for a fast and constructive review process. We also thank the Sydney Business Insights team and members of the Digital Disruption Research Group for their ideas and input to the research, and Alexander Richter, Daniel Reker, and Christoph Müller-Bloch for helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. https://www.tracetogether.gov.sg/

2. https://www.health.gov.au/resources/videos/covidsafe-app-how-does-it-work

3. Information via http://www.rki.de/covid-19

4. https://endorsecovidsafe.com/