Regulatory systems, institutions and practices

Regulation is a fact of life. It affects the food we eat, the safety of our workplace, the goods and services we buy and sell and the quality of our natural environment. It plays an important role in guarding New Zealanders from harm, protecting our rights, and ensuring that markets work fairly and efficiently. However, when regulation is badly designed or implemented it can fail to provide these protections, or place unnecessary burdens on personal freedoms and business efficiency. So is the New Zealand regulatory system as good as it should be, and how could it be improved? • Steven Bailey is a director at the Productivity Commission and led the commission’s inquiry into regulatory institutions and practices. Judy Kavanagh is a principal advisor at the New Zealand Productivity Commission

CONCEPTUALIZING THE IMPACT OF WORKAROUNDS – AN ORGANIZATIONAL ROUTINES\u27 PERSPECTIVE

Employees’ acceptance and resistance of new technology and social structure are frequently examined in Information Systems research. Resistance is expressed in various forms, including a lack of cooperation, workarounds, and physical sabotage. Workarounds, in particular, have a dual nature and can refer to both, undesirable behavior that contradicts organizational structure and to desired organizational innovation. While antecedents and different forms of workarounds have been explored, literature has remained silent on how and why workarounds of an individual employee can affect activities performed by other employees and thereby, change work routines on an organizational level. Since employees’ day-to-day performances constitute the ostensive patterns of a routine, we argue that workarounds will not only impact performances of adjacent routines, but also transform the organization as a social structure. With a preliminary set of qualitative data from 24 interviews, we used a multiple case study design to conceptualize six patterns that illustrate how and why workarounds can spread through an organization. The patterns are systematized by a framework that considers three types of collaboration and two types of handoffs across routines. This first evidence points at the nature of complex desired and undesired consequences that can emerge through workarounds performed in an organization

WORKAROUNDS IN RETAIL WORK SYSTEMS: PREVENT, REDESIGN, ADOPT OR IGNORE?

We conducted a case study in a Dutch supermarket chain in order to explore the emergence of workarounds in the retail environment. We studied what types of workarounds occur during the use of retail information systems and how manager can handle the identified workarounds once they become aware of them. The data was acquired qualitatively through interviews, observations, and document analysis, and validated by means of an online survey. After identifying and classifying 29 workarounds, a conceptual framework was developed that links workaround features to workaround categories and then to certain actions as response to them, namely prevent, redesign, adopt and ignore. This study contributes to existing research by categorizing workarounds in an unexplored domain and developing a conceptual framework of workaround categories and re-sponses. We were able to identify patterns of relationships between types of workarounds, some of them similar to those found for other industries and others that appear to be specific to retail work systems, probably due to the inherent characteristics of retail work systems

AFFECT AND MATERIALITY IN ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS USAGE: SETTING THE STAGE FOR USER EXPERIENCE

Drawing on the fields of organisational theory, information systems and human-computer interaction, this paper proposes a novel perspective for studying information systems usage by individuals in organisations – in this case, in the back office of a major US-based accounting firm. By conceptualising usage as a holistic user experience – a situated and temporally emergent inseparable mesh of behaviour, bodily movements, perception, cognition and affect – the researcher can avoid misleading reductionism and the overly simplistic reasoning of technological or social determinism. To demonstrate empirically the value of this perspective, the paper focuses on the intertwining of two aspects commonly ignored in prior information systems literature – the affective and the material. Building on Pickering’s (1993) “mangle of practice”, and on the literatures on moods (Bless and Fiedler, 2006), identity (Ashforth and Mael, 1989) and sociomateriality (Orlikowski, 2010), the entanglement of human identity, affective states and enterprise systems materiality is examined, based on observational and interview data. The findings suggest that adopting this theoretical perspective facilitates understanding of the complex, situated nature of enterprise systems usage

Technology Target Studies: Technology Solutions to Make Patient Care Safer and More Efficient

Presents findings on technologies that could enhance care delivery, including patient records and medication processes; features and functionality nurses require, including tracking, interoperability, and hand-held capability; and best practices

Understanding Individual User Resistance and Workarounds of Enterprise Social Networks: The Case of Service Ltd

The purpose of this study is to explore the use of Enterprise Social Networks (ESN), namely, Yammer and Chatter, using the lens of resistance and deployment of workarounds among individuals employed in a large, service sector organization. By doing so, we can illustrate the motivation behind individual use of ESN within a large organization, the reasons for not using it and the outcomes of their choices on the organization\u27s performance and day-today activities. The research approach of our study involves employing a qualitative approach and adopting the interpretive research perspective. Our findings illustrate that there are several bottom-up and top-down pressures, which effectively hinder the adequate or successful use of ESN and drive user resistance and workarounds. The contributions of our study are manifold. First, since ESN are actively considered by organizations, our findings can inform policymakers on the issues that might arise beyond implementation, more so, during the actual use of the system. In other words, the results of this research can shed light on the areas where their efforts are best placed. At a theoretical level, our study enriches the extant literature associated with adoption issues, by explaining that ESN involve multi-level organizational characteristics found within a specific context of use, that of ESN