Information infrastructure in the face of irreducible uncertainty

This short paper draws upon our initial investigations into digital infrastructure for oil and gas exploration. Digital oil and gas exploration exhibits many of the hallmarks forwarded under headings such as Big Data (Agarwal and Dhar 2014; Lycett 2013a), the (Industrial) Internet of Things (Boos et al. 2013), and Industry 4.0 (Lasi et al. 2014) – along with associated projections of technological possibilities (Swanson and Ramilier 1997). At the same time, digital exploration is conducted within the confines of well-established industrial structures, where the installed base of existing organizational, institutional, and technological arrangements temper and shape technological visions and trajectories. Digital exploration is therefore a fruitful venue to build and extend upon infrastructure theory to explore the relationship between digitalization, transformation of work and organizing, and industrial innovation (Nambisan et al. 2017).