Gian Marco Campagnolo

The managed prosumer: evolving knowledge strategies in the design of information infrastructures

This paper contributes to the reworking of the traditional concepts and methods of Science and Technology Studies that is necessary in order to analyse the development and use of social media and other emerging information infrastructures (IIs). Through long-term studies of the development of two contrasting IIs, the paper examines the prosumer-management strategies by which vendors manage their relationships with their diverse users. Despite the sharp differences between our cases – an online-game with social network features and traditional enterprise systems – we find striking homologies in the ways vendors manage the tensions underpinning the design and development of mass-market products. Thus their knowledge infrastructures – the set of tools and instruments through which vendors maintain an adequate understanding of their multiple users – change in the face of competing exigencies. Market expansion may favour ‘efficient’ quantitative user assessment methods and the construction of abstract user categories for designing new generic solutions and services around market segments. However where a product extends into new and unfamiliar user markets the growing social distance between developer and user may call for ‘richer’ direct ways of knowing the user. We note the emergence of collective fora, which can provide a space for independent action and innovation by users. However, these were managed communities. Certain user relations functions were pushed out to the community or third-party organizations and at other times pulled back in-house – for example, to increase vendor direct control. This picture is far removed from the visions of seamless integration of producers and users encouraged by notions such as prosumer.

The Evolution of Client‐Consultant Relationships: A Situational Analysis of it Consultancy in the Public Sector

This research proposes a situational understanding of the role of con‐sultants. The analysis is grounded on a case from Italian local government over a ten year period. The case is one of the earliest adopters of an ERP system in the public sector. The paper extends current understanding of client‐consultant relationships by developing a specific picture of changes in the role of consultants over time. In the case analysed, multiple changes in client‐consultant relationships occurred. They were due to particular historical contingencies in the evolution of the structure of expertise in the field. The case contributes to knowledge on consultants by contrasting bilateral and instantaneous accounts of client‐consultant relationship with a perspective that overcomes the distinction between context and individual action.

Phenomenology, Organizational Politics, and IT Design: The Social Study of Information Systems

Information systems are researched, published on, and utilized as an extremely broad and vital sector of current technology development, usually studied from the scientific or technological viewpoints therein. Phenomenology, Organizational Politics, and IT Design: The Social Study of Information Systems offers a new look at the latest research and critical issues within the field of information systems by creating solid theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical findings of social developments. Professionals, academics, and researchers working with information will find this volume a compelling and vital resource for a cross fertilization among different, yet complementary, and strictly connected domains of scientific knowledge, consisting of information systems research, philosophy of social science, and organizational studies.

From specifications to specific vagueness: how enterprise software mediates relations in engineering practices

Relying on an ethnography of software demonstrations given by members of the product development and sales division of a system engineering company to various industrial design engineers at different sites, the article identifies patterns of specific vagueness with reference to a software graphic modeling tool. A statement is vague to the extent that it has aspects that resist inquiries. In our fieldwork on software demonstrations, sales system engineers resisted inquiries specifically concerning (i) the amount of software functions, (ii) their range, and (iii) their degree of integration. The article discusses the role of software-specific vagueness in the transition of system engineering services to the international market of enterprise architecture. Contrary to expectations concerning engineering when it is viewed as a matter of logic, in the context of the enterprise architecture software market the establishment of a common ground of reference between sales system engineers and various sorts of design engineers does not rely on solving manufacturing problems. Rather, it relies on making problems specifically vague in order to allow both the specific use of the system for the purpose at hand in a particular industrial context and the vague solution that responds to the enterprise architecture markets logic.

Technology as we do not know it: The extended practice of global software development

Abstract In this paper we propose an understanding of spatially and temporally extended practice. By introducing the notion of ‘appresentation’, we describe how global IT business actors make sense of matters that they cannot know directly. We make appresentation apparent by discussing how vendors take account of the needs of future customers and also of their current users of whom they have no direct knowledge. Based on long-term research into Information Technology market dynamics, we offer three examples of appresentation, used strategically by global IT vendors to link to sites and times that they have no direct experience of and examine how they extend their sense-making resources outwards from the local situation. The work that we call appresentation consists of a set of strategies including (i) preparation; (ii) user endowment and (iii) user segmentation. We contribute to existing perspectives on extended practice by describing how not knowing is used to produce knowledge that extends beyond the single site.

The Evolution of Client-Consultant Relationships

This research proposes a situational understanding of the role of con‐sultants. The analysis is grounded on a case from Italian local government over a ten year period. The case is one of the earliest adopters of an ERP system in the public sector. The paper extends current understanding of client‐consultant relationships by developing a specific picture of changes in the role of consultants over time. In the case analysed, multiple changes in client‐consultant relationships occurred. They were due to particular historical contingencies in the evolution of the structure of expertise in the field. The case contributes to knowledge on consultants by contrasting bilateral and instantaneous accounts of client‐consultant relationship with a perspective that overcomes the distinction between context and individual action.

The Evolution of Client-Consultant Relationships: A Situational Analysis of IT Consultancy in the Public Sector: THE EVOLUTION OF CLIENT-CONSULTANT RELATIONSHIPS

This research proposes a situational understanding of the role of con‐sultants. The analysis is grounded on a case from Italian local government over a ten year period. The case is one of the earliest adopters of an ERP system in the public sector. The paper extends current understanding of client‐consultant relationships by developing a specific picture of changes in the role of consultants over time. In the case analysed, multiple changes in client‐consultant relationships occurred. They were due to particular historical contingencies in the evolution of the structure of expertise in the field. The case contributes to knowledge on consultants by contrasting bilateral and instantaneous accounts of client‐consultant relationship with a perspective that overcomes the distinction between context and individual action.

Changing Spaces for Social Learning in ERP Implementation: A Situational Analysis

The research presented in this paper focuses on two different periods of implementation choices in the history of an Italian public sector organization as ERP software support shifts from being provided in-house to a market-based supply. The case illustrates a deeply contextual reflexivity between the various compositions of supply and use space and the social learning that shapes organizational members’ representations of ERP system implementation choices. Data on distinctive situational maps of organizational resources concerning implementation choices and post-implementation enhancements of the system were gathered through biographic interviews and observations of the system in use. Two different situational maps of IT related expertise were identified across different time periods: the “Steering Committee” period (1998–2001) and the “Key Users” period (2002–2005). We explore the role played across time by the reconfiguration of actors and their interactions along the ERP system support chain in patterning the way project participants make sense of notions like “customization” or “standardization”.

Designing the Accountability of Enterprise Architectures

Designing enterprise architectures for accountability is to reason about options. Instead of taking enterprise architectures as products, the paper seeks to comprehend how they are produced. Considering enterprise architecture as an entangled category of sociological, political and democratic challenges provide an opportunity to determine the political topos of enterprise architectures.