Neil C. Ramiller

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.

Perceived compatibility of information technology innovations among secondary adopters: Toward a reassessment

Abstract The perceived compatibility construct, as drawn from theory on innovation adoption and diffusion, serves poorly the study of innovation among information technology users within organizations. Drawing on literature addressing innovation-organization fit and the implementation of new technologies, the current study modifies and extends the conceptualization of perceived compatibility. The enhanced construct, which embraces a variety of technical, personal, and organizational dimensions, is explored in a pilot study with prospective users of computer-aided software engineering (CASE) technology. The empirical results reveal a multidimensional structure for the construct, though somewhat at odds with the structure postulated. The findings indicate that there is potential for continued exploration in this area, and suggest that efforts to reconceptualize how organizationally-based users perceive information technology innovations be broadened.

The 'textual attitude' and new technology

Abstract One of the most important tasks information systems executives face is making sense of emerging opportunities for organizational innovation through information technology. However, the parlance of information systems practitioners yields a variety of metaphors suggesting that this crucial task is a perilous one, in which success is far from assured. This paper reports on an interpretive study of these metaphors, using data from field interviews. Five images are identified, which evoke certain hazards and illuminate aspects of a successful executive response. The subsequent analysis of these images reveals how they serve constructively in promoting rationality in sensemaking, against a background that includes an ontologically problematic innovation and belief formation under institutional pressure. The paper concludes with some thoughts on the wider role of discourse in innovation sensemaking.

“Airline Magazine Syndrome”: Reading a myth of mismanagement

While on a business flight, a CEO reads in an airline magazine about an information technology innovation that promises fabulous returns to the adopting corporation. Returning home, the CEO demands immediate action from the senior information systems executive. So goes a story current among systems practitioners. This tale of “Airline Magazine Syndrome” is analyzed here as an instance of narrative, through research informed by innovation theory and field interviews with business executives and systems practitioners. The analysis considers both how the story depends for its meaning on the sociotechnical context of innovation, and how that context is illuminated by the listener’s engagement with the story. “Airline Magazine Syndrome” is a kind of moral drama, in which misdeeds portend crisis and failure. As such, there are also lessons for a happier ending, in the domain of real practice, in which organizational innovation with information technology can have better prospects for success.

Mindfulness Routines for Innovating with Information Technology

Formal structures and systematic practices have considerable promise for helping to foster mindfulness in information-technology innovation, especially when it comes to organizations’ reflective assessments both of their readiness for innovation and of their own mindful processes. In relation to structures and practices, this essay proposes a number of “mindfulness routines” and considers also the proposals offered by the other authors in this special issue. It also examines two paradoxes entailed in such “organizing for mindfulness,” one structural and the other temporal. The first paradox is that routines for mindfulness run the risk of undermining the very thing that they are meant to support, in part by tempting complacency and in part by fostering a limiting role structure for mindfulness. The second paradox relates to the dual role of past history both as a burden on the mindful regard for the present, and as a potential source of experience and insight. The discussion concludes by considering the value for mindfulness in explorations that go beyond the reach of routine and historical reflection.

Virtualizing the Virtual

This essay advances a supplementary definition of “the virtual” that is aimed at helping our research community speak more clearly to the organizational changes and the place-time reinventions taking place in connection with the virtual in the more customary sense(s) of that term. The intent in linking the issue of definition to organizational transformation is not to make proposals about the specific forms, functions, and reinventions that might, or ought to, appear, but rather to reflect on the processes through which such changes, whatever their character, come about. Adapting Deleuze’s conceptualization of the virtual, I extend virtuality to include the imaginary and fictitious. The focus, in particular, is on the kind of fiction that, in Latour’s phrasing, is “seeking to come true”; thus, our interest is in the fictionalizations in which real actors engage as they struggle discursively to construct their future realities. This calls for attention to the social and political context and, more specifically, to the manner in which the privileges of “author-ity,” for fictionalization, impact what is actualized as organizational structure and practice. The paper concludes with a consideration of the implications for research practice of viewing IT-enabled change, like that which is producing virtual work and virtual organizations, as a form of authorship.

The Service Behind the Service: Sensegiving in the Service Economy

In this modest essay, we reflect on the crucial role of sensegiving, and hence sensemaking, in the creation of IT-enabled service encounters. “Creation” has two meanings here: (1) the design of repeatable (reproducible) IT-enabled services, and (2) the on-going coproduction of IT-enabled service events by service providers and recipients. Indeed, we will argue that the sense given by diverse and role-differentiated actors constitutes in its own way a crucial and pervasive service that enables services in the more familiar sense. Sense-giving, as a “service behind the service,” is of particular salience when it comes to novel IT-enabled services, because of the challenges posed by their innovative character. As a practical matter, we are especially interested in how failures in the delivery of innovative services can be caused by shortfalls in sensemaking and sensegiving, and how the difference between successful and failed service outcomes commonly turns on choices made during the design of IT-enabled service systems. These designs either recognize and embrace, or marginalize and ignore, the required and novel sensemaking and sensegiving of employees and customers. We also recognize that system designs are rarely determinative (as constraining as they might prove to be), and that service outcomes will still depend on the variable appropriation of information technology in real situations of practice. We conclude our essay by outlining some research directions in IT-enabled service delivery, arising from these issues.

IT sensemaking and internal partnering: field notes on barriers

Internal partnering in the introduction of new information technologies presumes a coordination and accommodation among the efforts of heterogeneous participants to interpret, or make sense of, such technologies as organizational opportunities. Field data, however, suggest that prospective adopter organizations commonly face a number of obdurate barriers to coordinated sensemaking. The IS executive and his/her function may be ill-prepared to engage with business problems and may suffer crucial conflicts of affiliation. Users may lack knowledge essential for playing a serious role in envisioning the potential applications for information technology, and practical opportunities for their sensemaking may be procedurally unsupported. Finally, senior management may fall short in vital leadership.

Turning Products into Services and Services into Products: Contradictory Implications of Information Technology in the Service Economy

Ramiller, N. C., Davidson, E., Wagner, E. L., and Sawyer, S., 2008, in IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, Volume 267, Information Technology in the Service Economy: Challenges and Possibilities for the 21 Century, eds. Barrett, M., Davidson, E., Middleton, C., and DeGross, J. (Boston: Springer), pp. 343-348. 25 TURNING PRODUCTS INTO SERVICES AND SERVICES INTO PRODUCTS: Contradictory Implications of Information Technology in the Service Economy