Mumin Abubakre

Enhancing organisational competitiveness via social media : a strategy as practice perspective

The affordances, popularity and pervasive use of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have made these platforms attractive to organisations for enhancing their competitiveness and creating business value. Despite this apparent significance of social media for businesses, they are struggling with the development of a social media strategy as well as understanding the implications of social media on practice within their organisations. This paper explores how social media has become a tool for competitiveness and its influence on organisational strategy and practice. Using the ‘strategy as practice’ lens and guided by the interpretivist philosophy, this paper uses the empirical case of a telecom organisation in Tanzania. The findings show that social media is influencing competitiveness through imitation and product development. Also, the findings indicate how social media affects the practices within an organisation, consequently making the social media strategy an emergent phenomenon.

Revisiting the trajectory of IT implementation in organisations: an IT culture perspective

Purpose Organisational implementations of information technology (IT) normally fail due to cultural forces that inhibit the usage levels required to facilitate successful IT implementation. The purpose of this paper is to explore IT implementation from an IT culture perspective (Leidner and Kayworth, 2006). In particular, it identifies and follows the trajectory of IT culture archetypes that emerge during the implementation process and further investigates their role in facilitating successful IT implementations. Design/methodology/approach This research adopts the qualitative single case study approach and draws on the implementation of a management information system in a Nigerian global bank. Findings The findings illustrate three different IT culture archetypes and provide insights into their dynamic nature. The progressive weakening of two IT culture archetypes and the corresponding strengthening of the third archetype shows how initial vision conflicts can get transformed into vision agreements. Originality/value This paper extends the IT culture perspective by illustrating how a congruence relationship between IT cultures and IT artefacts can be fostered. The paper shows how diverse IT cultures can develop reasonably quickly in line with initial user experiences of a system. When IT cultures are aligned with the values embedded in IT, positive engagement and usage of the technology results strengthening the presence of embracing IT cultures.

Strategy Reformation? Materialization of Social Media in Telecom Industry

The pervasive use of social media is influencing change within organization. This paper uses sociomaterial lens with agential view to understand how social media is reforming strategy in Telecom organization through exploring changes brought by social media to organization, evaluating the changes with selection of strategic theories as well as providing insight on adoption of social media by telecom organizations. Following an interpretivist philosophy with exploratory purpose the study uses case study methodology employing secondary data and observation to explain how social media practices are shaping strategy at Vodacom. Social media is reforming strategy within telecom industry by exerting influence on organizational process for instance product development and marketing strategy.