Nicholas Berente

Information flows and business process integration

Purpose – Many business process improvement efforts emphasize better integration, yet process integration can mean many things. The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the importance of information flows to modern business processes, and draw upon recent organizational and information systems literature to characterize process integration and to derive four principles of process integration: accessibility, timeliness, transparency, and granularity of information flows.Design/methodology/approach – Using a field study, the four principles of process integration are applied to analyze ten different business processes across five organizations.Findings – In total, 18 generalized activities are identified that describe non‐integrated behavior, and “keying in known data” was found to be the most common. Among other findings, analysis highlights the importance of documentation to modern business processes, especially for coordination roles, and the paper describes three different purposes for documentation fo...

Institutional Contradictions and Loose Coupling: Postimplementation of NASA's Enterprise Information System

Through a grounded analysis of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASAs) enterprise information system (IS) implementation in the months immediately following the go-live, we show how NASA can be characterized as an institutionally plural organization, rife with diverse institutional logics, some consistent and some contradictory to each other. The enterprise system is introduced in accordance with the logic of managerial rationalism, but some of the institutional logics that organizational actors draw upon and reproduce contradict the logic of managerial rationalism in certain situations. In these situations, organizational actors loosely couple elements of their practices from the practices implied by the enterprise system, thus satisfying the demands associated with both institutional fields. We identify four generalizable forms of loose coupling that result from these institutional contradictions: temporal, material, procedural, and interpretive, and discuss their effects on both the system implementation and local practices. Further, we show how, through the use of institutional logics, researchers can identify fundamental institutional contradictions that explain regularities in the situated responses to enterprise system implementations---regularities that are consistently identified in the literature across a variety of organizational contexts.

Arguing the value of virtual worlds: patterns of discursive sensemaking of an innovative technology

With the rapid pace of technological development, individuals are frequently challenged to make sense of equivocal innovative technology while being given limited information. Virtual worlds are a prime example of such an equivocal innovative technology, and this affords researchers an opportunity to study sensemaking and the construction of perspectives about the organizational value of virtual worlds. This study reports on an analysis of the written assessments of 59 business professionals who spent an extended period of time in Second Life, a popular virtual world, and discursively made sense of the organizational value of virtual worlds. Through a Toulminian analysis of the claims, grounds, and warrants used in the texts they generated, we identify 12 common patterns of sensemaking and indicate that themes of confirmation, open-ended rhetoric, demographics, and control are evident in the different types of claims that were addressed. Further, we assert that the Toulminian approach we employ is a useful methodology for the study of sensemaking and one that is not bound to any particular theoretical perspective.

Requirements in the 21st Century: Current Practice and Emerging Trends *

Requirements have remained one of the grand challenges in the design of software intensive systems. In this paper we review the main strands of requirements research over the past two decades and identify persistent and new challenges. Based on a field study that involved interviews of over 30 leading IT professionals involved in large and complex software design and implementation initiatives, we review the current state-of-the-art in the practice of design requirements management. We observe significant progress in the deployment of modeling methods, tools, risk-driven design, and user involvement. We note nine emerging themes and challenges in the requirement management arena: 1) business process focus, 2) systems transparency, 3) integration focus, 4) distributed requirements, 5) layered requirements, 6) criticality of information architectures, 7) increased deployment of COTS and software components, 8) design fluidity and 9) interdependent complexity. Several research challenges and new avenues for research are noted in the discovery, specification, and validation of requirements in light of these requirements features.

Wikipedia, Critical Social Theory, and the Possibility of Rational Discourse

Information systems researchers that apply critical social perspectives frequently emphasize the potential for information technology to serve as a mechanism for increased rationalization, domination, and control. Such theorists often overlook or discount the liberating aspects of information systems. In this study, we apply the ideal of rational discourse developed by Jürgen Habermas to the phenomenon of Wikipedia in an effort to explore empirically the emancipatory potential of information systems. We contend that Wikipedia embodies an approximation of the necessary conditions for rational discourse. While several challenges persist, the example of Wikipedia illustrates the positive potential of information systems in supporting the emergence of more emancipatory forms of communication. The corresponding implications for researchers and design professionals alike are discussed.

A social representations perspective on information systems implementation: Rethinking the concept of “frames”

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to advocate a “social representations” approach to the study of socio‐cognitive processes during information systems (IS) implementation as an alternative to the technological frames framework.Design/methodology/approach – The paper demonstrates how social representations theory can improve research outcomes by applying it to three recent studies that employed the technological frames framework.Findings – It is found that because the technological frames framework is overly technologically centered, temporally bounded, and individually focused, it may lead to symptomatic explanations of IS implementation. Alternatively, using the theory of social representations can offer more fundamental causal explanations of IS implementation processes.Research limitations/implications – IS researchers are encouraged to use a social representations approach to study IS implementation as the theory provides a rich vocabulary to examine the formation, change, and content of represen...

The Next Wave of Digital Innovation: Opportunities and Challenges: A Report on the Research Workshop 'Digital Challenges in Innovation Research'

The turn of the millennium is marked by rapid developments in digital technologies. The ubiquity of digitalization is one of the primary forces behind innovations across a wide range of product and service categories. In order to create an initial forum for scholars from different fields, and to establish a preliminary theoretical framework that can guide future scholarly research on digital innovations, we organized an interdisciplinary research workshop, entitled “Digital Challenges in Innovation Research”, held on October 18 – 20, 2008 at Temple University. This report documents major themes from the workshop, highlighting the new opportunities and challenges associated with digital innovation. The workshop participants identified three design characteristics of digital technology that play pivotal roles in facilitating digital innovations: (1) the homogenization of digital data, (2) the programmable digital computing architecture, and (3) the self-referential nature of digital technologies. Furthermore, the participants saw digitalized products as having seven material properties: programmability, addressability, senesability, memorability, communicability, traceability, and associability, which lead to the emergence of loose coupling across the four layers of a digital service architecture, which includes devices, networks, services and contents. The main challenges and opportunities for innovation outcomes emerge primarily from convergence and digital materiality. First, new research opportunities lie in understanding different forms and capabilities of ongoing digital convergence. Second, another set of research issues are associated with new entrepreneurial opportunities that emerge from embedding digital capabilities into non-digital products and services. Finally, the increased use of digital tools and the interpenetration of digital and physical materiality in work practices offer new sets of challenges and opportunities that need to be carefully investigated. The primary factors that affect innovation processes are heterogeneity, generativity, locus of innovation and pace. First, the combination of heterogeneity, generativity, and distributed locus of innovation leads to the emergence of dynamic, non-linear patterns of digital innovation. Developing and validating analytic models to understand how heterogeneous actors at the periphery of digital innovation networks are related to innovation patterns will be an important challenge for innovation scholars. Second, understanding the temporal dynamics of digital innovations provides another important opportunity for future innovation research. Finally, future research should investigate the multi-layered nature of organizational transformations that are associated with the digitalization of products. The report concludes with six broad recommendations for future research: multi-disciplinary research, design scholarship, multi-methods approach, taking data seriously, understanding infrastructure, and theorizing digital technology.

Dynamics of inter‐organizational knowledge creation and information technology use across object worlds: the case of an innovative construction project

Organizational research argues that under relational forms of governance a high degree of both information pooling and physical interaction are necessary for inter‐organizational knowledge creation. Yet, recent studies of information and communication technologies (ICTs) suggest that both practices at the same time are sometimes unnecessary. We address this discrepancy by developing a framework whereby the intensity and proportion of these inter‐organizational practices are affected by the object world congruence between designers within and across partnering firms, and the level to which a common information technology platform is embedded in their activity. Through a multi‐level case study of a Frank Gehry construction project we illustrate how designers with highly congruent object worlds, due to a strongly embedded common information technology platform, could jointly create knowledge despite decreased physical interaction. Conversely, designers from firms with incongruent object worlds or with congruent object worlds lacking a strongly embedded common ICT platform demanded a higher degree of physical interaction for effective knowledge creation. Our research suggests a dynamic, evolutionary model of inter‐organizational knowledge creation influenced by variation in object world congruence and the levels of embedding a common ICT platform.

Dressage, control, and enterprise systems: the case of NASA's Full Cost initiative

In 2004, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) implemented Full Cost, an activity-based accounting program through an agency-wide enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation. We apply Foucault’s notion of ‘dressage’ to highlight aspects of demonstrative control associated with this implementation effort and to outline the different dimensions along which control was distributed. We suggest that some elements of Full Cost and the ERP system were geared toward satisfying disciplinary requirements without necessarily contributing to productive activity. We term these elements dressage-as-control. Our findings indicate that dressage-as-control breeds dressage-as-response: employees’ responses to control imperatives that are intended merely to satisfy the demand for control by exhibiting public compliance, but make no direct contribution to the execution of work. Accordingly, we propose that the ideal of complete enterprise control remains unattainable, as aspects of demonstrative control are inevitably implicated within broader enterprise-wide control systems within contemporary organizations. We conclude with implications for research and practice.

Process gatekeepers and compliance with enterprise processes

– Process gatekeepers, individuals responsible for strictly enforcing data completeness at critical points within a process, are often used to encourage compliance with processes associated with enterprise systems. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between process gatekeepers and process compliance., – Through a mixed‐method approach of both qualitative and quantitative analyses of one firms sales processes, the paper identifies and measures four key drivers of compliance with the work process: ease of use, perceived value, urgency, and gatekeeper flexibility., – The paper finds that process context‐specific, gatekeeper‐related factors directly affect an individuals willingness to work within the bounds of prescribed processes. In particular, the paper finds evidence that gatekeeper flexibility appears to encourage process compliance., – These findings are limited in generalizability to a single organization, by potential instrument‐related biases, and by typical caveats associated with models derived from exploratory research., – Implications include the motivation of the need for overall process compliance in realizing the benefits of an enterprise information system, as well as the counterintuitive notion that gatekeeper flexibility may be positively related to process compliance., – This paper introduces the notion of process gatekeeper, devises a context‐specific measure of gatekeeper flexibility, and relates this notion to an overall model associated with process compliance in an enterprise system context.