Digitalisation of Highly Regulated Sectors: Understanding Enablers for Digital Technology Adoption

Digital technologies have the potential to improve processes, increase productivity, and materialise new benefits. Despite these benefits, heavily regulated sectors such as the energy sector, characterised by conservatism and a low appetite for risk, encounter obstacles hindering their adoption. This is significant. If digital technologies could be more extensively used in these sectors it might realise considerable economic, environmental, and societal value. Within this paper we present a case study of the Connected Infrastructure project - a successful digital technology project which was conducted by the UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA). We conduct a workshop with key project stakeholders and use this to identify and rank barriers to digitalisation within the nuclear sector. These barriers are used to structure a discussion to elicit enablers - factors considered to have contributed to the successful implementation of the project. Through thematic analysis ten enabler themes are identified. These are mapped to the transdisciplinary hierarchical system proposed in the seminal work of Jantsch. The results show that both barriers and enablers encompass three levels of the hierarchy (purposive, normative, and pragmatic). No enablers are found to map to the empirical (fundamental science) level. The conclusions emphasise the significant impact of multilevel coordination, which is a distinguishing factor of transdisciplinary approaches and suggest creating a repository of successful technology implementation projects, in relatable contexts, as a practical strategy for improving adoption rates. Future work will look to create and validate guidelines for enabling digital technology uptake in the nuclear sector.