DongBack Seo

Exploring the dark side of IS in achieving organizational agility

exploring the dark side of is in achieving organizational agility organizational agility Based on previous research, we define organizational agility as a set of processes that allows an organization to sense changes in the internal and external environment, respond efficiently and effectively in a timely and cost-effective manner, and learn from the experience to improve the compe-tencies of the organization. 1 The basic logic in pursuing organizational agility is this: The organization must be alert to perceive incoming signals from its internal and external environments. Then, it needs to process the signals and respond adequately, recognizing the impact that each piece of information may contain. Responding reactively and proactively may require a realignment of resources, processes, and even objectives if the changes are significant. With the incoming information processed, the organization has the opportunity to learn and improve its competencies. Compe-tency refers to an organizations abilities to effectively perceive, respond, realign , and learn from the experience of participating in dynamic environments. Agile organizations will move quickly in this cyclical process in near real-time sequences, prioritizing the actions by weighting the impact of signals of change and challenges, while considering costs. Perception is the ability to sense changes in the environment. As a first step, organizations need to understand their internal and external environments to sense changes and trends that affect them, the sources and types of signals, and their characteristics (frequency, strength, form, etc). It is easier to perceive strong and visible signals rather than intermittent and weak ones. The role of IS in perception is to capture large amounts of data, which can be retrieved from multiple sources, in multiple formats, and make the data accessible, with limited compatibility problems. For example, POS (Point Of Sale) systems collect data about where, when, and what products are sold; organizations can track and OrganizatiOnal agility is currently a popular topic in the academic and practitioner communities. While Information Systems (IS) has been identified as having a positive impact in the pursuit of the goal of the agile organization, we also want to present a set of forces that may act against agility by means of inefficient or ineffective design, use or understanding of the role of IS in the process of acquiring signals, responding and learning from experience. Here we mean IS to refer to both systems and technologies that support business functions such as collecting, creating, editing, processing, storing, …

Towards Integrating Acceptance and Resistance Research: Evidence from a Telecare Case Study

There is wide agreement that acceptance and resistance are crucial factors in information system (IS) adoption. Research has yielded many theories that have focused on either acceptance or resistance, often implicitly assuming that these are opposites. This paper proposes a two-factor view on acceptance and resistance, and shows how this idea may advance our knowledge of IS adoption. In developing a user reactions framework, we take a first step towards integrating the IS literature on acceptance and on resistance. This framework distinguishes between two behavioural dimensions, namely, acceptance, ranging from high use to non-use, and a dimension that ranges from enthusiastic support to aggressive resistance. Combining the two dimensions leads to four categories of user reactions. We show the frameworks usefulness by analysing data from a telecare implementation project. The findings identify ambivalent reactions. Many clients are identified as supporting but non-using, while we also find telenurses and care coordinators that show themselves to be resisting but using. These findings support the view that non-acceptance and resistance are conceptually non-equivalent. Our data suggest voluntariness as one determinant of the variation in behavioural reactions encountered. We argue that the concepts are also functionally different: IS implementers will have to adapt their strategies to the different reactions described.

Managing IS adoption in ambivalent groups

Insightful implementers refocus user ambivalence and resistance toward trust and acceptance of new systems.

Comparing attitudes toward e-government of non-users versus users in a rural and urban municipality

Abstract Many e-government and Information Systems (IS) adoption studies have focused on peoples attitudes during the initial and post-adoption periods, but have not taken into account the fact that many people never use or experience e-government services. This paper investigates the attitudes of non-users versus users toward e-government services in two locales: one urban and one rural municipality in the Netherlands. Although rural and urban municipalities have distinct characteristics that may affect peoples attitudes toward e-government, the research thus far has not differentiated between them. We propose a model to investigate these differences using factors based on various IS acceptance and resistance theories, including enabling factors (e.g., perceived behavioral control), inhibiting factors (e.g., perceived risk) and other factors (e.g., trust and geographical closeness). The model was tested via a survey of 337 non-users and users of e-government services from one rural and one urban municipality in the Netherlands. The findings reveal intriguing similarities and differences among the four groups, contributing a more nuanced perspective to the e-government and IS literature.

Web_2.0 and five years since

We investigate technological and organizational readiness in adopting Web_2.0 applications.We conduct a longitudinal study between the initiatives in 2009 and the performances in 2014.We provide internal views of the consumer marketing companies adopting Web 2.0 application. The arrival of social and collaborative software applications (e.g., Facebook and LinkedIn), known as Web_2.0 applications, has provided an opportunity for consumers to express their opinions and knowledge. While consumers use Web_2.0 applications on a daily basis, organizations are struggling to embrace fully functioning Web_2.0 applications for their businesses. The types of initiatives for Web_2.0 and how they affect an organizations use of various Web_2.0 applications are investigated from a long-term perspective. The organizational supports and the efforts needed to implement Web_2.0 applications do not reveal their consequences immediately, so a term of five years between the measure of initiatives and their consequences is considered, and then the results of those organizational efforts are tracked. The initiatives are measured at the building stage of Web_2.0 (i.e., 2009) and performance is measured at a point when the adoption of Web_2.0 has matured (i.e., 2014).

The interplay of conscious and automatic mechanisms in the context of routine use: An integrative and comparative study of contrasting mechanisms

Researchers have been closely studying how information technology services became a routine part of our lives. Studies have found that users who routinely use online services either consciously develop loyalty or automatically develop a habit. But many studies now mix the elements of conscious and automatic use despite the great differences in these phenomena. This study proposes a new theoretical framework of how the conscious and automatic mechanisms simultaneously, but differentially, regulate postadoption phenomena in the context of online information services. An empirical test confirms that these two mechanisms have highly discernible patterns that researchers and managers alike must heed.

Case study: Gaining competitive advantage through value-shifts: A case of the South Korean wireless communications industry

The central question of strategic management is how to create competitive advantage and sustain it. This case study addresses this issue from the perspective of the nature of dynamic markets. The concept of value-shift is proposed where the change over time in which the aspect of a product or service that once had value becomes obsolete or becomes a commodity. Essentially, it loses its differentiation from other products and services as others imitate or substitute for it. It is argued in this respect that it is critical to examine ways that organizations can manipulate value-shifts to gain advantage, including delaying and riding a value-shift. These concepts and dynamics are reported in a case study of the South Korean wireless communications industry.

Using the thread-fabric perspective to analyze industry dynamics

Introduction Rapid advances in technology pose severe challenges to organizations that are dependent on their technology for day-to-day operations as well as strategic renewal. For example, one major challenge is the decision of which new technology to adopt and when to adopt it. If an organization implements a technology too early and its industry takes up another technology later as the standard, the organization will have wasted resources and must expend more in order to switch or make its technology compatible. If the organization waits for a standard to emerge, it will lose any benefits of being the first mover. Organizations struggle to predict the shape of tomorrows industry, especially more dynamic industries like wireless communications. Current business theories are limited in their ability to explain phenomena happening in these dynamic industries. They are also weak in their ability to predict the totality of these types of industries. Theories like the resource-based view of the firm and dynamic capabilities can assess an individual firms competitiveness and analyze competition between one firm and another under preordained and well-ordered industrial structures, but they cannot explain the total shape of an industry and the positioning of firms within the industry. For example, the analysis and comparison of organizations in the wireless industry, such as Nokia, Samsung, Qualcomm, Vodafone, Hutchison, and Verizon, can assess a companys resources and capabilities and its superiority over another in its resources or capabilities. But these theories do not explain the whole picture of the industry, why companies are pursuing different technologies, why and how they ally with one another, or how companies with fewer resources or capabilities can compete with those with more, for example. They also fail to account for how organizations and industries change constantly through internal and external forces. In fairly static industries like the traditional auto industry, companies operated on the same stable supply chains and other systems for decades, thus it was fair to detach two or more organizations from the same shared industrial context to compare them. However, we cannot separate organizations from their industrial context in current dynamic industries like information technology, because organizations and the industry in which they belong co-evolve rapidly by affecting each other. None of the standard business theories can give us clear answers to how, for example, Qualcomm and Korean electronics companies, that started with few resources, capabilities and market share, could create and then expand their territory in the GSM-dominated wireless industry led by Nokia. More broadly, the nature of modern business competition appears to be undergoing a fundamental change. To explore the new industrial dynamics, we use the intuitive ideas of threads, fabric and weaving to develop a perspective which promises to greatly facilitate the description and analysis of highly competitive and dynamic industries such as the wireless industry. The Thread-Fabric view perceives organizations and industries as organic entities rather than as rigid and mechanical units. The proposed perspective also differs from existing theories in that it allows a way to observe industries and predict the future not only at the level of individual firms but also from the scope of entire industries. For industry, we hope this theory can support managers and decision-makers to understand the fast-changing business environment and build strategies and tactics to achieve their business goals. For academia, we hope our proposal shows a new way to analyze and understand how industries transform in this day and age. Here, we describe our framework and clarify its details by applying it to the example of the global wireless industry. We use this framework to analyze current dynamics in the wireless industry: the fight for third-generation technology standards, and within that, the competition over wireless internet platform standards. We also discuss the possible use of this framework to predict future directions in industries.

Conceptualization of the Convergence Phenomenon to Develop an Applicable and Integrated Framework for the Emergence of Software-as-a-Service

Financial service companies, such as banks and accounting firms, and product software companies, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) software companies, previously from discrete industries, are beginning to adopt Software-as-a-Service principles, potentially leading them into a new environment. The motivation for this research is to understand what is beginning to occur between these software and service industries, as a result of the convergence phenomenon. However, a similar phenomenon has already happened among the mobile and landline communications, computer, and TV broadcasting industries. Through reviewing and analyzing literature on the convergence phenomenon in the industries in which it has already developed, the main aspects are identified and integrated into one comprehensive framework with which to analyze the phenomenon as a whole. Their inter-relations and dynamics are explored via mobilization of institutional theory. The framework’s applicability is then explored against the historical case of the telecommunications, broadcast and computer industries. Future research suggestions are offered to further test and corroborate the framework to increase its generalizability and applicability for analyzing the convergence phenomenon in all industries experiencing it at different paces.

Theoretical perspective to analyze organizational strategy for information and communications technology standards

Standardization of innovative technology can create great competitive advantage for organizations. In addition, the consequences of interactions between organizations as they implement their standards strategies can have tremendous socio-economic impact, especially with the current convergence in information and communications technology. The existing research on standards uses economic theories to explain how economic factors stimulate technology standardization and game theory to analyze how organizations collaborate on standardization, but these theories both overlook the issue of how organizations make decisions about their standards strategies and the results of their interactions with other actors. Thus, the research question presented in this paper is: how do organizations reach their strategies for standards during and after the standardization process? To answer this question, we need a holistic perspective to analyze the context of organizational standards strategy, including the situation of any given organization and how the organization interprets its situation to choose or develop a certain strategy. This research presents a framework based on combining two theories, ANT (actor network theory) and self-organized complexity.