# Digital Infrastructure as a New Organizational Digital Climate Dimension
## 5 Discussion  
The evolution of digital transformation within organizations is not merely about technological adoption; it profoundly influences organizational culture and climate [65]. This complexity is often underestimated, with many organizations embarking on digital transformation initiatives with no holistic plans or coherent digital strategies [66]. This oversight, coupled with the lack of technical resources and poor digital infrastructure, poses significant challenges to digital transformation efforts. A key contribution of this research is the delineation and understanding of the organizational digital climate concept, emerging from the establishment of digital infrastructure. The narratives elicited from interviewees present a complex and dynamic view of the digital climate, indicating an active discourse on digital infrastructure components within the organization. These discussions reveal organizational cues that shape employees' perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors towards digital tools utilization. However, the data also point to diverse and sometimes conflicting environmental cues, which can complicate employees' formation of a coherent understanding of expectations for digital tools usage, thus impeding the development of shared perceptions of desired behaviors. Our findings echo those of [PERSON] et al. (2022) and [PERSON] (2023), emphasizing the significant role of the digital infrastructure as perceived by employees [65; 66]. However, we also identified indications of a diminished valuation of these aspects, such as issues with interdepartmental network connectivity or inconsistent expectations around digital data sharing. According to climate theory, the importance or priorities of certain aspects should be evaluated within the broader array of a company's strategic considerations [67]. In this context, our findings suggest that inadequate investment in digital infrastructure may inadvertently signal to employees that the priority of digital work is low. The study indicates that management may not consistently advocate for digital environments, thus not effectively highlighting the importance of digital tools for optimizing operations and collaboration. This finding underscores the intertwined nature of digital climate and digital infrastructure, with the latter including three main sub-category enablers: connectivity, data lake, and a common digital language. The status of these enablers in the studied organization suggests an insufficient investment in an environment prioritizing digital capabilities and data usage. Without a robust digital infrastructure, efforts for embracing digital capabilities and processes may face significant challenges. Such infrastructure is not only necessary for supporting data-driven tasks but is also central to fostering a high digital climate and motivating employees to utilize these capabilities to their full potential. Within the connectivity sub-category, most participants agreed that they desire simple, interoperable, reliable, and secure infrastructure in the connectivity context. Implicit organizational cues, such as a preference for stand-alone digital silos among departments over digital interconnectivity, are bound to affect employees' perceptions, hindering them from perceiving the digital climate as a high priority. Participants recognize that this vision can be realized only through cross-organization collaboration supported by open standards. As outlined in previous work, the connectivity architecture significantly impacts establishing open channels of organizational collaboration: \"A network architecture supporting consistent rich behavior in collaborative, interactive applications\" [68].