Towards a common data-driven culture: A longitudinal study of the tensions and emerging solutions involved in becoming data-driven in a large public sector organization

•Case study on data-driven initiatives in Norwegian public sector.•Identifies oganizational tensions from incompatible data cultures.•Cultural differences hinder data-driven initiatives.•Top-down facilitation can unify data culture, improving decision-making. In recent years, the push to make organizations data-driven has led to data-focused software projects, both in the private and public sectors. The strive for increasing data-driven initiatives introduces a range of new socio-technical challenges, yet there are to date few empirical studies in terms of how data-focused initiatives affect large organizations with significant variations in terms of data needs and usage. This study presents a longitudinal descriptive case study of how data-driven initiatives in the Norwegian public sector cause organizational tensions in a very large, complex organization. We conducted 32 semi-structured interviews over a period of 18 months representing two different data-intensive parts of the organization that had developed incompatible data cultures. Our study shows that these cultural differences create organizational conflicts that hinder data-driven initiatives. The findings also suggest, however, that overcoming these is possible through the strategic, top-down facilitation of a common data-driven culture built on uniting data principles, in turn potentially leading to improved decision-making and enhanced innovation.