Building digital resilience against crises: The case of Taiwan's COVID‐19 pandemic management

Abstract

AbstractDigital technologies are playing an increasingly central role in crisis management. Despite concerted efforts by information systems (IS) scholars to explore the capabilities of digital technologies to foster resilience against crises, very few have investigated the dynamics of building digital resilience in turbulent times. This study, drawing upon the resource orchestration view (ROV) and through an empirical investigation of Taiwan's COVID‐19 pandemic management, unpacked the black box process of governments leading heterogeneous societal entities to promote resource orchestration actions for the development of digital resilience. The research findings revealed four patterns of digital resource orchestrations—dual‐purposing existing IS, balancing data exploitation, enacting online co‐production, and augmenting social network effects—that led to rapid and effective pandemic crisis management in Taiwan. We incorporated our findings into a research model of digital resilience in the making, thereby providing a mechanism for building digital resilience at a societal level. The research outcomes foreground temporal and societal aspects of digital resilience that contribute to the literature by adding new insights to the currently limited research on the operational process of building digital resilience.