How the LEGO Group Is Embarking on Architectural Path
Constitution to Transform Its Information Infrastructure into a
Digital Platform
Robert Lorenz Törmer
Department of Digitalization, Copenhagen Business School, Howitzvej 60, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Keywords: Information Infrastructure, Digital Platform, Enterprise Architecture, Enterprise Systems, Path Constitution,
Path Creation.
Abstract: Traditional companies are increasingly turning towards platform strategies to gain speed in the development
of digital value propositions and prepare for the challenges arising from digitalization. This paper reports on
the digitalization journey of the LEGO Group to elaborate how brick-and-mortar companies can break away
from a drifting information infrastructure and trigger its transformation into a digital platform.
Conceptualizing information infrastructure evolution as path-dependent process, the case study explores how
mindful deviations by Enterprise Architects guide installed base cultivation through collective action and
trigger the creation of a new ‘platformization’ path. Additionally, the findings portrait Enterprise Architecture
management as a process of socio-technical path constitution that is equally shaped by deliberate human
interventions and emergent forces through path dependencies.
1 INTRODUCTION
While information technology (IT) has traditionally
occupied a supporting role for organizations, new
business models emerge that have digital components
inseparably inscribed into their value proposition (El
Sawy, 2003). The economic and societal shift towards
this digital paradigm is commonly referred to as
“digitalization” (El Sawy et al., 2015, p.2).
Companies that are able to capture the moment can
seize opportunities from new ways of doing business,
but the disruptive forces of digitalized business
models also pose enormous threats on incumbent
firms. Incumbents are therefore embarking on
strategic digital transformations to inject digital
technology into their physical products, gain the
agility to develop new products as well as services
quickly, and leverage business ecosystems of digital
partners for co-creation of value (Matt et al., 2015).
At the heart of this digital transformation rests an
increased orientation towards digitally enabled
platform-based business models (Cusumano &
Gawer, 2002; Eisenmann et al., 2011; Gawer, 2014;
Eaton et al., 2015). Responding to competitive
pressures from digital natives, traditional brick-and-
mortar companies are nowadays equally adopting
digital platform strategies (Ross et al., 2016).
However, little is known in the academic literature
on how digital platforms come into being or how they
are constructed (de Reuver et al., 2016).
Simultaneously, companies’ IT trajectories are
subject to path dependencies and irreversibility that
complicate corporate IT platform innovations
(Fichman, 2004). Consequently, addressing this
phenomenon requires an insider’s perspective on how
such dependencies can be overcome to create new
development trajectories for corporate IT landscapes.
This paper therefore elaborates how the Enterprise
Architecture (EA) function in the LEGO Group is
constituting a new ‘platformization’ path to gradually
transform the company’s information infrastructure.
Thereby, the study sheds light on the following
research question: How can a company trigger the
transformation of its drifting information
infrastructure into a digital platform?
Accordingly, this paper presents a single case
study as part of an action research project in the
LEGO Group. The primary source of evidence entails
ten semi-structured interviews with key informants
that were conducted at the company’s premises. The
interviews were supported by an interview guide
Törmer, R.
How the LEGO Group Is Embarking on Architectural Path Constitution to Transform Its Information Infrastructure into a Digital Platform.
DOI: 10.5220/0006697306490656
In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2018), pages 649-656
ISBN: 978-989-758-298-1
Copyright
c
 2019 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
649

containing open-ended questions. Additionally, the
action research diary of the author as well as internal
documents from the LEGO Group are used as
supporting sources of evidence.
The remainder of this paper starts with a review
of the academic literature on digital platforms,
information infrastructures, and path constitution.
Then, a recap of the LEGO Group’s ongoing
digitalization journey and the case evidence expose
how the LEGO Group is applying EA management as
a vehicle to gradually transform its information
infrastructure into a digital platform. The subsequent
analysis develops a path constitution perspective on
this process. Eventually the paper closes with
findings and conclusions.
2 INFORMATION
INFRASTRUCTURES AND
PLATFORMS
The academic literature on technological platform
management mainly consists of two separate research
strands that a small, emerging body of research is
beginning to bridge. On the one hand, the economic
theoretical perspective has conceptualized platforms
as two-sided markets and has produced insights on
platform competition (Gawer, 2014; Thomas et al.,
2015). The majority of platform research within the
context of information systems (IS) follows the
technological engineering perspective, on the other
hand, which studies platforms as technological
architectures that drive platform innovation (Gawer,
2014). Conceptualizing a platform as a stable core
and variable peripheral components, this research
strand explains how modular architectures spur
organizational agility by providing a technological
architecture to innovate upon in production and
design (Ghazawneh & Henfridsson, 2013; Gawer,
2014; Eaton et al., 2015).
More recent evidence suggests that firm-internal
enterprise platforms and infrastructures, such as
enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, play a
key enabling role in leveraging digital technologies
for innovation (Sedera et al., 2016; Lokuge & Sedera,
2016; Henfridsson & Bygstad, 2013). Particularly
ERP systems “are increasingly serving as a platform
to which other tools can be added in order to take
advantage of shared data and resources” (Yoo et al.,
2012). Sedera et al. (2016), however, also reveal that
not all enterprise platforms are suitable to support
digital platform innovation and their impact remains
unclear (Sedera et al., 2016; Damanpour, 1991).
The concept of an information infrastructure (II)
is to a large extent overlapping with the one of a
platform and has therefore often been applied to study
similar phenomena (c.f. Tilson et al., 2010). Both
concepts describe shared socio-technical systems that
consist of a set of IT capabilities, are emergent in
nature, and evolve in a path-dependent nature to serve
initially unknown user needs (Hanseth & Lyytinen,
2010). Nevertheless, platforms and II are distinct
phenomena that exhibit decisive differences.
Platforms are built into a design context, which
remains under central control by architectural
principles that form a design framework (Hanseth &
Lyytinen, 2010). II, by contrast, are unbounded, open,
shaped by heterogeneous and autonomous actors, and
lack global control (Star & Ruhleder, 1996;
Henfridsson & Bygstad, 2013). Hanseth & Lyytinen
(2010, p.1) argue that II are “recursively composed of
other infrastructures, platforms, applications, and IT
capabilities”.
The development of II bares an idiosyncratic
coordination challenge (Grisot et al., 2014; Hanseth
& Lyytinen, 2010), which originates from the fact
that most IIs are distributed across a diverse set of
actors and lack of control is a fundamental attribute
of II development (Ciborra, 2000). In the pursuit of
individual goals, distributed actors leverage parts of
the II’s pre-existing components – referred to as the
installed base (Grisot et al., 2014) – to append new
socio-technical elements (Sanner et al., 2014). In
recognition of these constraints, most extant research
on II development tends to see path dependence as a
deterministic force on the development trajectory.
Accordingly, II development has been framed as
‘installed base cultivation’, which denotes the
incremental modification of the installed base until it
comes as close as possible to a desirable scenario
(Hanseth, 1999).
3 PATH CONSTITUTION
In the general path dependence literature, this
perspective corresponds to the phenomenon of
processes that are “unable to shake free of their
history” (David, 2001, p. 19). This conceptualization
entails an ‘outsider’s view’ that neglects the active
engagement by human actors as path evolution is
determined by contingencies and cannot break out
unless exogenous shocks occur (Sydow et al., 2009).
Accordingly, processes are driven by mutually
interacting variables that generate feedback loops and
nonlinear dynamics (Masuch, 1985; Stacey, 2007).
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The concept of path creation, on the other hand,
takes an ‘insider’s’ view on path-dependent processes
(Garud et al., 2010) and stresses the active
involvement of agents driven by ‘a logic of control’
in shaping the evolutionary path (Garud & Karnoe,
2001; Karnøe & Garud, 2012). At the heart of path
creation lies a process of mindful deviations by
embedded agents “from existing artifacts and
relevance structures fully aware that they may be
creating inefficiencies in the present, but also aware
that such steps are required to create new futures”
(Garud & Karnoe, 2001). Consequently, innovation
trajectories are less deterministic than assumed by the
path dependence view.
Integrating the two perspectives, Meyer &
Schubert (2007) and Sydow et al. (2012) introduce
the notion of path constitution to account for the
entanglement of history and human agency in the
process of technological innovations. Both
contributions define a path as a non-ergodic process
of interrelated events through which one of multiple
initially available options gains momentum, even
though the eventual solution was not predictable at
the beginning of the path. Processes involved in a
path may be partly or entirely influenced by
knowledgeable human actors (Sydow et al., 2012;
Singh et al., 2015), but are independently
characterized by irreversibility, momentum, and
potential lock-in situations (Sydow et al., 2012).
Additionally, Singh et al. (2015) reveal that path
trajectories are shaped by sequences of reinforcing
and transforming episodes that determine if a path
eventually results in a lock-in or not. While
reinforcing episodes continuously reduce the
availability of options, transforming episodes make
additional options actionable and contribute to the
prevention of lock-in situations (Singh et al., 2015).
4 DIGITALIZATION IN THE
LEGO GROUP
As one of the first brick-and-mortar companies in the
world, the LEGO Group has made it a top
management agenda to leverage digitalization as a
fundamental pillar of the overall business strategy. As
the implementation of this agenda resulted in several
“digitalization moves” (El Sawy et al., 2015, p.2),
which placed heavy demands for novel functionality
on the enterprise IT platform, the need for a new
complementary IT platform soon became evident. An
EA Director explains: “We have a fairly complex
landscape, but still […] one big system […] which is
being used all over the globe. […] We have global
processes, global solutions. That brings in a lot of
advantages that things are integrated and tied
together, but […] because of this huge, tightly
integrated, tightly coupled solution, we have
difficulties with reacting fast” (EA Director,
Corporate IT, LEGO Group). Business processes
have been standardized and integrated to a large
extent on non-redundant, global enterprise platforms
that enable efficient operational transactions. The
tight coupling between systems, however,
undermines IT flexibility as change requests and
upgrades imply ripple effects on other landscape
components.
This platform architecture results from the fact
that architectural decision-making in the LEGO
Group has previously not been managed from a
global perspective to focus on the long-term
flexibility and evolvability of the system landscape.
As competing constraints, such as cost or functional
requirements, have often been prioritized over
architectural considerations, design decisions did
often not follow a coherent architectural framework
and were largely shaped by choices of autonomous
departments that were prioritizing local demands.
“We are moving forward very quickly in the more
digital space and there were really no principles or
no overlying roadmap […]. [This] meant that the
decisions were potentially going to be fragmented
and the wrong decisions [were] taken for the long
term” (Head of Business-Enabling Technologies,
Corporate IT, LEGO Group). According to the Head
of EA, “there has been wild freedom to operate from
an architectural point of view. […] Because we had a
distributed EA landscape before, […] nobody took
the end-to-end responsibility of those priorities that
go across the platform” (Head of EA, Corporate IT,
LEGO Group). At the same time, some design
decisions involved “less optimal solutions, because
[the architects] wanted to stay within [the] platform.
[…] I think we got too many solutions that are a little
bit artificially engineered, so they fit into what we had
and thereby we stuck also to stuff that we know (EA
Director, LEGO Group). The company’s holistic IT
landscape therefore evolved in the form of an II with
lack of centralized architectural control.
While the existing enterprise platform is a “rock-
solid, carefully designed and thoroughly tested
platform” (El Sawy et al., 2015, p.23), a new platform
was initiated to satisfy the future demand of rapidly
adding prototype functionality for innovative digital
products and services. This platform should be rich in
digital options and enable the implementation of
innovative value propositions without limitations by
How the LEGO Group Is Embarking on Architectural Path Constitution to Transform Its Information Infrastructure into a Digital Platform
651

technical debt (c.f. Woodard et al., 2012). Integrating
with the traditional enterprise platform in a loosely-
coupled manner, a new digital platform based on
micro-services as well as application programming
interfaces (APIs) should emerge (El Sawy et al.,
2015). Consequently, the platform would also
embody the option to open interfaces up for external
innovation by ecosystem-partners when appropriate.
5 ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE
IN THE LEGO GROUP
In order to trigger the transition from a distributedly-
managed II towards a centrally guided digital
platform, the LEGO Group has established a
centralized EA capability. “When we started to talk in
more details about what was needed for the future in
terms of direction-setting and governance, it became
clear in the leadership team that there was a need [for
a centralized EA function]” (Head of EA, LEGO
Group). Subsequently, the function was created out of
well-experienced former Solution. “We did not bring
in new people […], because we needed people who
had an internal understanding of our landscape”
(Head of Business-Enabling Technologies, LEGO
Group).
The new EA function is a small organizational
unit consisting of six Enterprise Architects (EAs) and
guides the evolvement of the platform landscape with
an integrated long-term perspective. The goal is to
build scalable, adaptable, and flexible IT platforms
that have digital options embedded to make sure that
new technologies can be seamlessly integrated. “We
will not let EA or bad architectural choices limit
future business opportunities” (Head of EA, LEGO
Group). “We will get to a state with a more agile
platform […] that will be more [flexible] towards
future demands […] and we will optimize the cost of
operating what we have” (CTO and Vice President,
Corporate IT, LEGO Group).
5.1 Strategic IT Direction
Against these overarching goals, the team’s specific
strategy and focus areas (c.f. Figure 2), emerged in a
cognitive process of sense-making that was shaped by
various stakeholders. Most notably, this process
revealed the need for long-term strategic directions
for data management, internal as well as external
integration, and cloud adoption going forward. “It
was not called out – to start with – that EA should
lead such big initiatives. […] It was first when the
team met and we started to talk about what the
biggest challenges for our platform are, that it
became clear” (Head of EA, LEGO Group).
In contrast to the management of large-scale
enterprise systems, the challenge for IT departments
in the digital age will be the implementation and
composition of specialized services and modules to
support desired value propositions. “Most companies
that are in the retail or consumer-facing sector are
very much moving away from that monolith concept
and towards the whole idea of micro-services and
contact solutions” (Head of Business-Enabling
Technologies, LEGO Group). Along with this
paradigm shift, also the tasks and responsibilities of
the EA function are changing. For the IT organization
to gain agility, Solution- and Application-Architects
need
to operate in close collaboration with business
Figure 1: EA Focus Areas 2017 in the LEGO Group (Source: the LEGO Group).
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stakeholders and require autonomy to compose
specific solutions with minimum constraints. “That is
where the EA role becomes so critical in terms of
setting the right principles and ensuring that what we
do gives people or technology the freedom, but is
done in a way that is right for the organization long-
term” (Head of Business-Enabling Technologies,
LEGO Group).
Consequently, the EA team decided to not only
manage and govern, but also lead the platform
direction by elaborating long-term strategies. The
development and implementation of these strategic
directions is primarily an organizational, rather than a
technical, challenge as the EAs have to convince key
stakeholders of the expediency and feasibility of
strategic architectural choices. “They need to catch
fire. […] We have to change the mindset not with a
big bang, but more: ‘See what we have found! Do you
agree?’ […] not just because it is something new, but
because we actually strongly believe that it is
something that can make us even more agile” (Senior
Enterprise Architect, Corporate IT, LEGO Group).
5.2 System Landscape Documentation
In addition, the EA team has elaborated a
documentation of the LEGO Group’s entire system
landscape that provides a clear picture of the as-is
situation, demonstrates the complexity of the system
landscape, and is currently leveraged to communicate
the criticality of a new architectural direction to all
relevant stakeholders. In the future, this landscape
documentation will mainly provide a basis to track
the platform’s state and elaborate the transition path
towards the target platform architecture. The CTO
explains: “Sometimes we all live in our small silos
and we forget how much stuff we have actually put
together […] In order to get anywhere, you need to
know where you are” (CTO, LEGO Group).
5.3 Engagement with the Architecture
Community
In order to bring the strategic directions to life, the EA
function’s design has been rooted in an architecture
community of Solution- and Application-Architects
that will implement strategic directions in concrete
architectural designs and thereby expose the EAs to
some of the actual decision-making. “We created this
kind of hybrid organization [...] which meant that the
architects were still rooted in [the delivery of
technology] and could not become too ivory tower”
(Head of Business-Enabling Technologies, LEGO
Group).
In order to spread the strategic directions within
the organization, the EA team has, on the one hand,
developed new EA design principles, an architecture
success scorecard, and new architecture panels in the
LEGO Group. The EA design principles are
following the lighthouse metaphor and describe the
ideal future state of the platform architecture that
individual design decisions should strive towards.
The success scorecard safeguards their
implementation by evaluating individual solution
designs in terms of their impact on the overall
platform architecture. In addition, the architecture
panels provide a forum where individual solutions are
challenged against the principles and all architects
engage in discussions around architectural quality. As
the principles and the scorecard are guiding a
multitude of diverse stakeholders from within and
outside the architecture community, the specific
content has been carefully elaborated in close
collaboration with a variety of heterogeneous opinion
leaders to provide meaningful guidance to all distinct
perspectives and interpretations. In the future, the
artefacts will be continuously refined by new insights
from strategic directions and should feed them into
the architecture community to guide platform
evolvement.
For this purpose, the vitalization and
empowerment of the architecture community has
been one of the most crucial challenges for the EA
team to foster close collaboration as well as cross-
fertilization. An important step in this context has
been the establishment of the mandate for all
architects to enforce architectural quality in
individual solution designs over other potentially
contradicting interests. “What I do hope that we will
not see happening in the future anymore is that
project leaders […] take architectural decisions
because of time-pressures, [or] budget constraints”
(EA Director, LEGO Group).
While the development of the strategic directions
is still on-going, the introduction of new EA design
principles and the success scorecard in the
architecture community are already making an impact
on design decisions in the LEGO Group. For once,
the two artefacts have triggered changes of mindset
and discussions around architectural quality in the
community. “I have already seen […] that it gives
people the ability to take a step back and look at the
decisions that we have made and actually question:
‘Are they the right ones?’. I am quite encouraged by
that” (Head of Business-Enabling Technologies,
LEGO Group). Additionally, discussions around the
two artefacts have also lead to revisions and
modifications of actual solution designs under
How the LEGO Group Is Embarking on Architectural Path Constitution to Transform Its Information Infrastructure into a Digital Platform
653

construction and their implementations are making
the first impact on the overall system landscape.
Nevertheless, these steps only constitute the small
beginning of a long journey of transforming the
LEGO Group’s II into a digital platform.
6 ANALYSIS
This section provides a detailed analysis of how the
LEGO Group’s EA function is embarking on path
constitution to pull its drifting infrastructure around
and introduce transforming processes through
collective action that will eliminate path
dependencies and pave the way towards a flexible
digital platform (c.f. Figure 2).
6.1 Path Dependence of Drifting
Information Infrastructure
Before the establishment of the EA function, the
LEGO Group’s IT landscape was shaped by
functionally distributed actors bolting individual
solutions onto the II’s installed base to satisfy
contemporary business requirements. This process
continuously reduced IT flexibility by increasing
tight coupling and architectural debt. The result was
an installed base that implied lower development
effort for novel IT capabilities, if they were simply
appended in the same fashion as previous solutions.
Since this behavior increased architectural debt even
further, the process was self-reinforcing in nature.
Consequently, the organization was progressing
on a socio-technical path of drifting II evolution (c.f.
Hanseth, 1999) that was beyond the influence of
human actors, incrementally reducing actionable
technology options, and lead to individual lock-in
situations in the selection of solutions.
6.2 Mindful Deviations and Path
Creation
The EA team has mindfully deviated from existing
structures in several ways to address the path
dependence of the IT landscape by creating a new
transforming evolution path and increasing
actionable technology options.
Against the predefined strategy of solely
governing the platform architecture, the EA team
identified the need for fundamentally new strategic
directions for integration, cloud, and data. As the
development of these strategies is met by resistance
from individuals in the company, the EAs are faced
with the challenge to mobilize minds, span
organizational boundaries, and co-evolve stakeholder
minds with ideas (c.f. Garud & Karnoe, 2001). For
this purpose, the team is involving key stakeholders
into the strategy-development process to equally
modify ideas and challenge mindsets in the
organization. According to Garud & Karnoe (2001),
the management of this tension between commitment
and flexibility is a crucial challenge of path creation.
Figure 2: ‘Platformization’ path triggered by mindful
deviations in EA Management.
Another mean of deviation has been the
development of new EA design principles, which
constitute a breaking departure from existing
practices and meanings. As they will impact the
frames and actions of a large stakeholder audience
(c.f. Garud & Karnoe, 2001), the principles have been
equally shaped through an engagement process of
heterogeneous stakeholders that required EAs to be
persistent to their initial ideas while equally
maintaining flexibility for modifications. Hence, the
ability to span boundaries and present “ideas in ways
that are understandable by others” (Garud & Karnoe,
2001) has been crucial to mobilize stakeholders.
By introducing the EA design principles and the
success scorecard to the organization, the EA team
strives for the guidance of collective action to
constitute a new path of platformization (c.f. Figure
2). This approach resembles the concept of installed
base cultivation and what Rolland et al. (2015) term
“enterprise architecting” to describe the intentional
cultivation of existing architectures over time. In
contrast to installed base cultivation, which tends to
view path dependencies as a near-inexorable force in
II development (Hanseth & Lyytinen, 2010), the
LEGO Group’s approach to EA management is
primarily focusing the constitution of new paths
through small incremental steps.
To enable these steps, the attainment of the
mandate to enforce architectural quality over
competing constraining factors in the design of
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individual solutions is a key deviation. As both, the
principles and the scorecard, are continuously refined
based on new strategic directions, the routes of more
fine-grained individual paths, which constitute the
overall platformization path, will be subject to
periodic change. Nevertheless, the overall direction
will remain constant and gradually transform the
system landscape into a digital platform.
Eventually, the generation of momentum around
future directions was additionally amplified by the
documentation of the current system landscape that
elucidates the path-dependent nature of the II’s
evolvement and simultaneously supports the
mobilization of minds for a new platformization path.
So far, the path-creating junction from the II’s
previous development trajectory is mostly observable
in terms of organizational momentum, mindset
changes, and the redesign of several individual
solutions. The continuation of this transformation
towards a digital platform will depend on the path’s
sustainment in the future.
7 FINDINGS AND
CONCLUSIONS
The case evidence and analysis reveal how companies
embarking on a digitalization journey can apply EA
management as a vehicle to trigger the gradual
transformation of a distributedly-managed II towards
a centrally-guided digital platform. Particularly, the
conceptualization of EA management as a process of
path constitution elucidates how an organization can
break away from the prevalent development
trajectory of an II shaped by socio-technical path
dependence. This paper discloses in detail that
enterprise architecting is a challenge of mindfully
deviating from existing structures to guide collective
action and cultivate the installed base of the IT
landscape through small incremental steps into an
intended development trajectory.
For this purpose, the case evidence explores
which specific deviations the EA team in the LEGO
Group is embarking on. By taking an insider’s view
on this process, the analysis shows that the creation
of a new platformization path requires EAs to not
only address socio-technical path dependence in
terms of IS (including their users), but also the
relevance structures and mindsets of stakeholders in
the IT organization. This observation stresses the
significance of human agency in EA management and
underlines the importance of boundary spanning
communication as well as the co-evolution of minds
and ideas (c.f. Garud & Karnoe, 2001). In the LEGO
Group, the hybrid setup of the EA function as well as
the pro-active engagement with key stakeholders
ensure buy-in in the organization for EA initiatives
and prevent the team from becoming an ivory tower.
The evidence therefore also supports Singh et al.'s
(2015) proposition that path constitution is equally
emergent as well as deliberate in nature and may
entail periods of stronger path-dependence, while
offering opportunities for deliberate intervention by
human actors at any time.
8 LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE
RESEARCH
Although the case evidence indicates a juncture in the
current development trajectory of the LEGO Group’s
II, it remains to be seen if this path can be sustained
and if the EA team’s deviations will truly create a
flexible digital platform. It is therefore impossible to
evaluate how effective the disclosed deviations are
and if the case evidence should be utilized to derive
normative conclusions. Nevertheless, the paper takes
an insider’s view on path creation in the present and
future research will address the significance of these
interventions for the eventual path evolution.
Eventually, this paper only presents evidence from a
single case. Before generalizing conclusions to a
wider population, more evidence is required to
evaluate, if and how other organizations are facing as
well as solving similar challenges.
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