E. Burton Swanson

Problems in application software maintenance

The problems of application software maintenance in 487 data processing organizations were surveyed. Factor analysis resulted in the identification of six problem factors: user knowledge, programmer effectiveness, product quality, programmer time availability, machine requirements, and system reliability. User knowledge accounted for about 60 percent of the common problem variance, providing new evidence of the importance of the user relationship for system success or failure. Problems of programmer effectiveness and product quality were greater for older and larger systems and where more effort was spent in corrective maintenance. Larger scale data processing environments were significantly associated with greater problems or programmer effectiveness, but with no other problem factor. Product quality was seen as a lesser problem when certain productivity techniques were used in development.

Information Systems Research Thematics: Submissions to a New Journal, 1987-1992

The flow of manuscripts through the editorial offices of an academic journal can provide valuable information both about the performance of the journal as an instrument of its field and about the structure and evolution of the field itself. We undertook an analysis of the manuscripts submitted to the journal Information Systems ResearchISR during its start-up years, 1987 through 1992, in an effort to provide a foundation for examining the performance of the journal, and to open a window on to the information systems IS field during that period. We identified the primary research question for each of 397 submissions to ISR, and then categorized the research questions using an iterative classification procedure. Ambiguities in classification were exploited to identify relationships among the categories, and some overarching themes were exposed in order to reveal levels of structure in the journals submissions stream. We also examined the distribution of submissions across categories and over the years of the study period, and compared the structures of the submissions stream and the publication stream. We present the results with the goal of broadening the perspectives which individual members of the IS research community have of ISR and to help fuel community discourse about the nature and proper direction of the field. We provide some guidelines to assist readers in this interpretive task, and offer some observations and speculations to help launch the discussion.

Measuring user attitudes in MIS research: a review☆

Management information system (MIS) user attitude measurement and research has been motivated by two distinct perspectives, termed the implementation perspective and the information perspective. A survey of the most significant work based on these perspectives is presented. The consensus of this work is that MIS attitudes are related to MIS use, broadly speaking. However, the usage-relevant components of user attitudes are as yet not well understood. More refined attitude concepts and measures are needed. One such concept, that of a users channel disposition, is advanced as part of a suggested research direction.

Departmentalization in software development and maintenance

Exploring the strengths and weaknesses of three alternative bases for systems staff departmentalization suggests the benefits of an organizational form in which maintenance is separate from new system development.

Emergent maintenance of ERP: new roles and relationships

How a firm supports its enterprise resource planning system after putting it into production, when its maintenance may be said to be emergent, is critical to the benefits it will eventually derive. Here we report a longitudinal case study of one firms emergent maintenance of its SAP R/3 system. The study reveals that maintenance-related roles and relationships differ substantively from those typical of traditional maintenance. We view this firms maintenance practices to be a harbinger of broader and longer-term change in maintaining application portfolios. We suggest that the roles and relationships involved are likely to be more complex and therefore more varied in organizational form. In particular, we anticipate: (1) greater sharing of the maintenance task among more participants, with the firms users often assuming the lead, supported by vendors and third parties; (2) the IS department often playing a more limited, but still key role in providing a portfolios ongoing support services; and (3) a contingency approach to maintenance, the best approach being a function of specific organizational and systems circumstances. Copyright

Adopting SAP at Siemens Power Corporation

This case describes how Siemens Power Corporation, a Richland, Washington, USA-based manufacturer of nuclear fuel assemblies, came to adopt and implement SAPs R/3 application suite, the worlds leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) package. The case introduces the reader to the type of decision making related to an ERP adoption and implementation and provides some interesting examples of factors which may influence actual decisions and outcomes. Among other things, the case touches on the following issues: the relationship between restructuring (re-engineering) and software adoption and implementation, the choice of package software, the pros and cons of alternative implementation approaches (‘big bang’ versus ‘phased’), the selection of hardware and the value of consultants.By January 1999 Siemens Power Corporations (SPCs) restructuring project was more than 2 years under way. To SPCs top managements great relief, the company had made major progress ever since SPCs German parent Siemens AG hired a consulting team to help SPC get back on its path towards profitability. In particular, the largest and riskiest of its individual restructuring subprojects – SPCs SAP R/3 implementation – seemed on the way to becoming a success.

Customer relationship management as advertised Exploiting and sustaining technological momentum

Purpose – The paper aims to raise the question: how can a new information technologys (ITs) early momentum toward widespread adoption and eventual institutionalization be sustained? The purpose of the paper is to examine sustaining technological momentum as a form of institutional work and entrepreneurship not widely recognized as such.Design/methodology/approach – The paper reports a case study of Business Weeks special advertising section used in 2000‐2004 to both exploit and help sustain the momentum of customer relationship management (CRM).Findings – The study finds that the advertisement sections producers employed it over several years to recurrently produce and disseminate credible discourse advancing CRM, incorporating models for action, and providing fresh meanings to the organizing vision for this technology so as to accentuate its progress and keep it worthy of continued attention. Most significantly, acquired momentum, while problematic to sustain, can nevertheless serve as its own resour...

Consultancies and capabilities in innovating with IT

When firms innovate with information technology (IT), they frequently retain consultants, who presumably bring certain capabilities to the process. But what capabilities are these and why do they seem to be so needed? In this essay, I consider several different consultancy specializations - business strategy, technology assessment, business process improvement, systems integration, business support services - and how they facilitate an IT innovation process both within and across firms. For each specialization, I examine the consultancys capabilities and contributions both to the client (within an engagement) and to the broader support of the innovation (across and beyond engagements). The analysis suggests a number of conjectures as to the influence of consultancies on an IT innovations adoption, diffusion and eventual institutionalization.

Information centers as organizational innovation: exploring the correlates of implementation success

Abstract:The information center (IC) provides an example of an organizational innovation based in the use of new information technology. While widely adopted, it has met with varying success among its implementors. This paper reports results from an exploratory study of IC adoption and implementation among twenty-seven information systems (IS) organizations. It identifies certain correlates of success—the size of the host organization at the locations served by the IS unit together with the total number of IC services provided—that have been previously overlooked. These findings have implications for research beyond the case of information centers. Specifically, they suggest that any implementation research founded on the “critical success factor” approach, where managers are asked to judge those factors important to the success of their innovations, will be inadequate unless organizational context is also considered by the researcher in explaining this success. Research to date has not always met this cr...

Special issue on institutional theory in information systems research: contextualizing the IT artefact

W e are pleased to introduce this special issue of the Journal of Information Technology on Institutional Theory in Information Systems (IS) Research. The publication of The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Powell and Dimaggio, 1991) and Institutions and Organization (Scott, 2001) were significant contributions to the renaissance in the study of institutions in the social sciences (Dimaggio and Powell, 1991). These influential books remind us that institutionalism is a highly complex field, where work is delineated across core disciplines, including economics, sociology, political science, history and ecology. To add to the complexity and richness of the theory, contributions have been divided into time frames labelled the ‘old’ and ‘new’ institutionalism (Greenwood et al., 2008). These authors suggest the conceptual foundations of ‘organisational institutionalism’ were established between 1977 and 1983 with seminal works by Meyer and Rowan (1977), Zucker (1977), Dimaggio and Powell (1983), Meyer and Scott (1983) and Zucker (1983). Between 1983 and 1991, institutional studies acknowledged that social values affect organizations and that organizations adopt structures for legitimation purposes. Yet, few attempts were made to test ‘institutional ideas’, and citations to the seminal papers were sparse (Greenwood et al., 2008). What was apparent was that many studies relating to ‘institutionalized organisations’ were located in the government and notfor-profit sector, thus overlooking that the ‘markets’ and private sector firms were also influenced by institutionalized effects and processes. Another observation was that organizations were often portrayed as ‘too passive’, so the theory was criticized as lacking an ‘agency’ dimension to understanding and explaining social phenomena. Since the early 1990s, institutional theory has gained momentum in the social sciences despite continuing ambiguity about concepts such as institution, institutionalization and institutionalism, and how both macroand microinstitutional influences can be reconciled within a single study. In an effort to provide conceptual clarity, Jepperson (1991: 145 and 152) offered the following definitions: institution is ‘a social order or pattern that has attained a certain state or property’; institutionalization, ‘denotes the process of such attainment’; and Institutionalism, is ‘a theoretical strategy that features institutional theories and seeks to develop and apply them’. Two additional concepts further emerged within the institutional theory literature. Deinstitutionalization is ‘the erosion or discontinuity of an institutionalized organizational activity or practice’ (Oliver, 1992: 563) and reinstitutionalization, represents an ‘exit from one institutionalization, and entry into another institutional form, organized around different principles or rules’ (Jepperson, 1991: 152). The last two decades have witnessed increased use of institutionalist concepts, such as legitimacy, logics and isomorphism. Suchman’s (1995) study distinguished among pragmatic, moral and cognitive legitimacy. Others called for better empirical measures to evaluate and test legitimacy (Zucker, 1987). Work on institutional logics further flourished, with some writers cautioning against using the term as a ‘buzzword’ (Thornton and Ocasio, 2008). Institutional isomorphism, for example a commonality in form and function (Dimaggio and Powell, 1991) generated renewed interest from researchers with work emphasizing the processual and transmission studies of earlier decades (Greenwood et al., 2008). More recently, work has emerged which is a departure from prior work on institutional persistence and isomorphism to explore new ideas on institutional entrepreneurship and change (Garud et al., 2002; Hardy and Maguire, 2008). The impetus for much of this work is to explore how and why agency plays a part in altering institutionalized patterns of behaviour. Characterized by epistemological pluralism and conceptual ambiguity, institutional theory has emerged as an important set of concepts and ideas for researchers across the disciplines. In the past decade, the IS field has seen a growing interest in institutional theory. These contributions are varied, with many studies using institutionalist concepts as a lens to interpret and analyse data, and fewer seeking to extend our theoretical understanding of institutionalism. With the exception of contributions that examine the relationship between technology and institutions (Barley, 1986; King et al., 1994; Orlikowski and Barley, 2001), IS that work using institutional theory has included topics on adoption and diffusion, development and implementation and structural changes across societal and industrial sectors, notably, SMEs, manufacturing, health and financial services. This Special Issue recognizes and promotes the relevance and richness of institutional theory in IS research. It questions the rhetoric that serves to isolate the IT artefact Journal of Information Technology (2009) 24, 283–285 & 2009 JIT Palgrave Macmillan All rights reserved 0268-3962/09