Anticipating the Digital: How Interpretive Debt and Layered Architectural Framing Shape Innovation Pathways

Long before new technologies are adopted, organizations already anticipate and shape what those technologies will become. Through a comparative ethnography of two municipal water agencies pursuing “smart meter” systems, this study shows how past innovation experience steers digital innovation’s earliest initiation period. Both agencies faced similar conditions but pursued the technologies in very different ways. The agency with decades of digital metering experience approached smart meters as a limited hardware replacement, while the second agency pursued them as a foundation for data-driven organizational transformation. To explain this divergence, this study introduces interpretive debt: the accumulated assumptions, obligations, and habits of attention from past innovation that shape what organizations recognize as possible in new technologies. It also develops layered architectural framing, showing how organizations focus on different layers of the digital stack. These aspects become consequential through anticipatory practices: organizational actions enacting projected futures before adoption. Through procurement, these practices shape what technologies can do; through reorganizing departments and workflows, they shape what the organization becomes. For organizations confronting new technologies, this study shows how digital futures take shape well before procurement, when organizations define both the technologies they adopt and the pathways they pursue.