Topics in Organizational Systems and Technology
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ItemThe Midlife Crisis of IT: Accurate Versus Inaccurate Perception of IT Effects( 2021-01-05)Information technology (IT) has been established as a major enabler for business performance. However, studies of the effects of IT typically involve the implicit assumption that the effects reported by the companies studied adequately and accurately describe IT’s effects. In this paper, we challenge this perspective by arguing that in many cases the perceived and actual effects of IT are different. Although most IT researchers likely recognize the discrepancy, this topic has not received much attention. Thus, through a case at a world-leading logistics company, we provide evidence that perceived and actual effects of IT can differ. On this basis, we develop a set of models that describe such discrepancies and use theories from the psychological literature to explain why the discrepancies occur. In this context, we use the term “midlife crisis” as a metaphor for what happens to decision makers’ perception of IT systems after a period of use.
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ItemPackaged Enterprise System Customization – A Systematic Literature Review( 2021-01-05)A packaged enterprise system (PES) is an Enterprise System (ES) software package that is built with certain assumptions about the business processes. It is offered to the business with an implemented and predefined set of functionalities, which, however, are seldom usable immediately, but require some customization. Sometimes only minor changes to PES are made while occasionally the system, offering more possibilities, is configured significantly. This paper aims at mapping what we know about PES customization, and presents a systematic literature review to form a coherent understanding of its topics, themes, methods, publication outlets, scientific disciplines, and researchers. Our findings show that the topic is scattered across disciplines and domains, the studies mostly relying on surveys and implementation phase case studies, and giving a generic view rather than focusing on certain domain or the type of PES. We thus propose a set of potential research topics, for example on the business domain level to better understand the dynamics of customization and its influencing factor.
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ItemManagement Emotion and Firm’s Propensity of Strategic IT Investment( 2021-01-05)Firm’s propensity of strategic IT investment describes the tendency of firms to engage in different strategic roles of IT when IT investment decisions are made. Different from prior IS business value literature that has largely taken rational decision making for granted, this paper considers the irrational characteristics of firms’ decision making and investigated the impacts of management emotion on firms’ propensity of strategic IT investment. Based on 191 annual reports data of 32 companies from three industries in a 6-year period (i.e., 2010-2015 fiscal year), we applied sentiment analysis to retrieve emotion tunes embedded in each report and analyzed the relationship with both the volume and the composition of three types of strategic IT signals (automate, informate and transform). Our results show that positive management emotion promotes firm’s propensity of all types of strategic IT investments, however, informate and/or transform IT gain more weights. With positive management emotion, firms also show propensity of investing in strategic IT different from the industry’s dominant IT strategic role
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ItemExploring the Tensions Between Management of Architectural Debt and Digital Innovation: The Case of a Financial Organization( 2021-01-05)In recent years, Information System (IS) scholars have increasingly explored the malleability and re-combinability of digital artifacts that facilitate innovation and change. In this paper, we focus on how architectural debt thwarts evolvability of complex IT architectures and systems founded on them. We conduct a case study in a major Scandinavian financial institution and explore their how they managed architectural debt during fast paced service innovation. Our analysis suggests that the firm’s capability to innovate depended on software developer’s ability to work across multiple syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic knowledge boundaries whilst addressing architectural debt. The paper offers two contributions. First, we add to the nascent body of socio-technical research on technical debt by illustrating how architectural debt cuts across multiple developer teams and architecture layers making it hard to identify and resolve. Second, we expand studies of digital innovation by identifying two interconnected tensions faced when innovators have to evolve complex IT architectures that lay the foundation for artefact malleability. We tie how the tensions are addressed to the firm’s capability to manage architectural debt.
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ItemBouncing Back after a Crisis: Lessons from Senior Management Team to Drive IS Resilience( 2021-01-05)In this paper, we adopt Agency Theory and Weill and Ross’s IT Governance framework to examine the decision priorities of senior executives and board of directors in the context of IS resilience planning, which falls under the broader umbrella of IT governance. As identified in our earlier research, although research was conducted on the topics of organizational resilience, and IT governance, there is a gap in the literature with respect to IS resilience. In this study we have also test and expand the basic assumptions of Agency theory. We account a case study of the Jade Software Corporation, in which we use Q-methodology to develop a typology of decision priorities for IS resilience planning. Analysis revealed two types of decision makers, each representing a unique perspective of IS resilience. These types are discussed, along with implications of findings, a theoretical framework for IS resilience, and suggestions for future research.