The Role of Anchoring in Actualizing IT Affordances in EMR Implementations

Abstract

Affordances are useful theoretical tools to study IT mediated organizational change. Affordance actualization process provides a temporal structure to build a model that lays out a non-deterministic sequence to understand the changes that happen in organizations on the introduction of new IS. Affordances and affordance actualization have been studied in many contexts with the focus on material agency of the new IS or human agency of the user groups. Using the case of an EMR implementation in a family and urgent care clinic in Canada observed over 5 years, we discovered that anchoring on legacy systems in place before the EMR implementation has a significant influence in the actualization of affordances of the new IS. We present an affordance actualization process model including the anchoring influence observed, to provide a richer explanation of affordance actualization in EMR implementations.