Marion Johanna Neunkirchner
BA, Social Work, FH Campus Vienna (2011). MA, Sociology (focus: security studies, sociology of law and criminology, digitalization), University of Vienna (2018). Traineeship at IRKS (2015). Social Worker for JBA in court prison since 2015. Joined VICESSE in 2018. Certified professional trainer for adult education according to SystemCert ISO 17024.
Sessions
Digitalization transforms our homes, workplaces, and lives in general. It is thereby an established way of shaping and optimizing organizations on all managerial levels. By following the needs for digitalization, the public sector faces similar difficulties as the private sector, even though law enforcement agencies do not create a monetary value in digitalizing their processes with the equal purpose as private institutions.
Regarding this background, the KIRAS-Project DIGDOK examines the possibilities for optimizing analog forms of inmate-related documentation in the Austrian penal system. In its particular research field, the project aims at the analysis of digitalization potential in prisons including gaps between organizational leadership functions and requirements, law, and the perspective of front-line end users. Even though, the variance between law enforcement and penal system, the two organizational units are inevitably linked, especially in terms of their exchange of information, public-organization specifics, ethical aspects, and inmates' rights.
Accordingly, developing an optimized end-product is a balancing act between all various stakeholders and therefore requires an initial open field approach increasingly condensing with the framework conditions and management requirements of the public service. Therefore, we conceived a mixed-method research design using qualitative empirical methods and business informatics methods in a circular procedure of grounded theory based situational analysis to fulfill this aim. According to the needs-oriented principle, the development of successful and sustainable technological solutions depends on the satisfaction and acceptance of end users regarding the benefit for their daily work.
Finally, digitalization and the use of technology change the everyday behavior of practitioners. Thus it has an impact on their particular use of discretion, which plays a central role on daily interaction in prisons and is at least challenging the organization structure of traditionally analogue-bureaucratically structured public institutions. By observing these changing spaces of action using technology, the research findings finally allow assumptions in two areas: first, the change and its potential for optimization of workflows and second in an organizational context of action theory, the more implicit influence on practitioners’ daily decision makings.