Digital Infrastructure Evolution: A Digital Trace Data Study

Digital infrastructures are socio-technical arrangements of physical objects, digital technologies, users, and processes. They constantly evolve and provide the foundation for the emergence and implementation of a variety of applications. But how and why do digital infrastructures evolve? In this short paper, we report on an ongoing study of an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) system by drawing on digital trace data about the system’s development process and using code complexity analysis. We present interaction patterns between the development of a digital infrastructure’s core services on the one hand and the development of specific applications on the other. Based on these patterns, we point to several puzzles that we identify around digital infrastructure evolution.