Claudio U. Ciborra

Formative Contexts and Information Technology: Understanding the Dynamics of Innovation in Organizations

Most accounts of computer-based innovation in organizational settings assume a naive picture of organizational change, overlooking events, features, and behaviours that, though unexpected and puzzling, may be the sources of inventions, new knowledge, new organizational routines and arrangements. The ambivalent, untidy, and often unpredictable character of IT-based innovation and change is hardly captured, even by more recent theoretical approaches that have nevertheless provided a deeper understanding of the complex interaction between technology and organizations. Based on field observations of the failures and successes during a major systems development effort in a large European cornputer manufacturer, we tell a different story: We submit that failures at innovation, surprises, and a whole range of related phenomena can be accounted for by introducing the notion of formative context, that is, the set of institutional arrangements and cognitive imageries that inform the actors’ limited learning, irrespective of their strategies, interests, espoused theories, and methods. Still, we suggest, plenty of opportunities for innovation lie in the open, pasted-up nature of formative contexts and a new vision of design based on ‘context-making’ interventions can bring them to light.

Organizational learning and core capabilities development: the role of IT

The resource-based view of the firm (RBVF) focuses on the firm’s resources and capabilities to understand business strategy and to provide direction to strategy formulation. This paper emphasizes the learning aspects of capability development and explores how information technology (IT) can contribute to it.

Organisational learning and core capabilities development: the role of IT☆

Abstract The resource-based view of the firm (RBVF) focuses on the firms resources and capabilities to understand business strategy and to provide direction to strategy formulation. This paper emphasizes the learning aspects of capability development and explores how information technology (IT) can contribute to it. As a standardized resource widely available, IT can participate in the fundamental process that transforms resources into capabilities and eventually into core capabilities. In this way, IT can become — embedded in core capabilities — an active component of the firms competitive advantages. The process by which resources end up being components of core capabilities in firms is a learning process that can be described and understood using RBVF concepts. Furthermore, the development of IT strategic applications (also called ‘strategic information systems’, or SIS) follows patterns that closely parallel the structure of that learning process. For this reason we propose an organizational learning model based on the RBVF, and use it to derive guidelines for management action aimed at improving IT effectiveness in organizations. The paper is organized as follows: the RBVF framework is summarized, including the concepts of capabilities and core capabilities and the organizational processes that lead to them. Next, an organizational learning model is presented: an interpretation of capability development that emphasizes situated learning and knowledge accumulation. The model is then used to show how IT can contribute to core capability formation in a firm: management action can mold the process to some extent, although it often unfolds ‘naturally’ embedded in an organizational context that is both determined by and determinant of learning. Finally, guidelines are discussed to come up and build strategic IT applications, based on the previous analysis. Short conclusions follow.

Crisis and foundations: an inquiry into the nature and limits of models and methods in the information systems discipline

Abstract The reasons for the present success of our discipline are due to factors that are somehow extraneous to it, i.e. the Internet and the strategic use of information technology. Both innovations stem from initiatives that have grown outside academia, and especially outside the focus of academic teaching and research in information systems: methodologies for systems analysis, design and development. We need to go back to the world of practice to find the foundations of a new style of information systems teaching and research. Unfortunately, this is not what is happening now. Take, for example, the recent research programmes on strategic alignment or software quality methodologies. They are just new instances of how methods hide rather than open inquiry and discovery possibilities.

Groupware and teamwork in R&D: limits to learning and innovation

In recent years the re-engineering of RD the continuous jolts to which such context must undergo because of radical shifts in management and RD the dialectics between local and global changes.

Disassembling Frames on the Assembly Line: The Theory and Practice of the New Division of Learning in Advanced Manufacturing

Car assembly plants have changed dramatically over the last twenty years, after the Kalmar model, lean production, semi-autonomous work groups and kanban. Or have they? By auditing the complex and intertwined learning processes taking place in a brand new assembly plant where the Punto, 1995 European “Car of the Year,” is manufactured, it turns out that radical changes in work organizations and operations have been implemented, but their impact stops halfway. The reason is due to the subtle influence that the Fordist “formative context” still exert on the way the plant is designed, and especially the way management knowledge is divided. By analyzing how bottlenecks and breakdowns are tackled by operators and managers, it is shown how the new division of labor requires a rethinking of the kind of know-how operators should master in order to cope with an advanced production system. The paper includes two important tools that were used during the analysis: a conceptual model of the learning organization, called the learning ladder, and the main steps of the learning audit methodology.

Toward a contingency view of infrastructure and knowledge: an exploratory study

IT infrastructures coupled with BPR initiatives have the potential of supporting and enabling new organisational forms and help firms face the challenges of globalisation. The management literature gives prescriptions of how to set up, implement and use infrastructures to reach a new IT capability, diminish transaction costs and obtain competitive advantage. However, the scant empirical basis of such literature goes hand in hand with the lack of a theory linking the deployment of infrastructure to the nature of the business and the industry. This study of the deployment and use of infrastructures in six large multinationals prepares the ground for a contingency approach to the whole issue. The different implementation processes and applications reported by the case studies suggest that there is much more variety than a ‘one best way’ recommended by the literature. The theory of the firm as a repository of knowledge processes is a good candidate to explain qualitatively the empirical evidence, and provides a contingency framework that can be further tested.

The transaction costs analysis of the customer-supplier relationships in product development

The user requirements analysis is an essential part of any automation effort. In this paper we use a methodology for users requirements analysis based on an advanced model, the one of transaction costs analysis, which overcomes the conceptual shortcomings of the data and cybernetic models. The goal of the TIBAS project was to design a multimedia platform for collaboration in product development in the car manufacturing industry. The paper examines how the European automotive industry affects the supplier-manufacturer relationship. We analyse this relationship based on transaction costs economics and on the study of communication breakdowns that affect business transactions. Based on the empirical study, a series of infrastructure services are identified which meet the industrial user requirements.