ICT infrastructure for innovation: A case study of the enterprise service bus approach Bendik Bygstad & Hans-Petter Aanby Published online: 6 May 2009 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2009 Abstract In this paper we investigate the relationship between ICT infrastructure and innovation. In recent years the concept of the enterprise service bus has been introduced as an ICT architecture that supports strong integration of distributed components and services, but at the same time allows for adding or subtracting business partners at short notice. What are the organizational issues and challenges of this approach? Building on a case study from Norway we investigated this topic in the context of innovation of ICT based services. Our findings were analyzed at three levels; the bus as technical infrastructure, the bus as innovation infrastructure and the bus as organizational structure. We find that the bus as technical infrastructure supports innovation within a business unit, while the bus as innovation infrastructure facilitates the innovation of new business services. Further, we propose that a shared topology of these three levels is important to support the overall innovation process. As illustrated in our case, this also raises new challenges for the innovative corporation. Keywords Innovation . ICT infrastructure . Enterprise service bus . Case study 1 Introduction Innovation of new ICT (information and communication technology) based services has become one of the most important arenas for global competition, with outstanding examples in many industries, such as search engines (Google), auctions (eBay), gaming (World of Warcraft), music (iPod) and travel services (Hotels.com). Our point of departure is that such innovations are seldom created out of air; they need an infrastructure to innovate on. A fascinat- ing example is the success of Google. As documented by Iyer and Davenport Google’ s innovation strategy depends heavily on their infrastructure. Google is “built to build”, with a scalable infrastructure which enables an accelerated product development cycle, with support for third party development (Iyer and Davenport 2008). Such infrastructures are large networks (or “assemb- lages”) of technical and business components (Ciborra 2000; Hanseth and Lyytinen 2008). For a successful corporation an effective infrastructure is an immense resource; it constitutes the backbone of the organization. On the other hand, there is a tension between infrastructure and innovation: the business forces urge rapid innovation, while the infrastructure supports incremental change. In 2002 the notion of Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) was introduced (Chappell 2004). The Enterprise Service Bus is an ICT architecture that aims at being able to support two seemingly contradictory features: It integrates a network of business partners at a transactional level, enabling real-time systems to communicate seamlessly. At the same time the components are loosely coupled; it is possible to add or subtract business partners at short notice, without affecting the daily running of operations. In principle, this is indeed an infrastructure to support service innovation. Inf Syst Front (2010) 12:257–265 DOI 10.1007/s10796-009-9169-9 B. Bygstad (*) Norwegian School of IT, Schweigaards gt.14, 0185 Oslo, Norway e-mail: Bendik.bygstad@nith.no H.-P. Aanby Norwegian ASA, Oksenøyv. 10 A, 1366 Lysaker, Norway e-mail: hans-petter.aanby@norwegian.no