Affordances for practice in CRM : A critical realist approach

As digitalization sweeps through workplaces, the academics have been intrigued by the theory of sociomateriality to better explain the dynamic, emergent and entangled consequences of the technologies on contemporary organizing and work practices. Sociomateriality, connoting the ontological inseparability of the material and the social, emerged to challenge the various dichotomies in information systems research by employing an agential realist stance. Later, this line of inquiry has been utilized alongside multiple theories in organization, management and sociological studies in order to understand how matter matters in organizational life. Simultaneously, its ontological base has expanded – a critical realist approach to sociomateriality arose from the criticism on the relational view on humans and artifacts. This study has been conducted from the critical realist approach to understand how a customer relationship management (CRM) system matters to strategy. It utilizes the practice-based approach, namely strategy-as-practice and the affordance approach to explain how a new customer-oriented strategy can be enacted through the interplay between the old and new technologies as well as the customer-facing employees. The thesis takes place in a case study environment, employing qualitative methods such as observation and semi-structured interviews. The case company is an occupational healthcare provider in Finland. The study identified the following constraints that trigger organizational change and lead to new technology implementation and new practices in customer relationship management: data inconsistency, routine discrepancy and relationship erosion. The perceived affordances post-dating the constraints were knowledge diffusion, management and controlling, workflow integration as well as analysis and development. Affordances are experienced in all levels of the organization

Exploring value co-creation within buyer-seller relationship in mobile applications services : a model development

Mobile phones have become an indispensable part of consumers’ life where they access core and supporting services via mobile applications services (m-applications). The focus of the present study is to explore dyadic buyer-seller roles in m-applications services’ value creation taking mobile banking applications services (MB-applications) as a case study. While prior research on value co-creation in service dominant logic (S-d logic) serves as a foundation for this study, it does not provide adequate guidance on how buyer and seller co-create value in m-applications services.To address this shortcoming, semi-structured interviews were carried out with 12 banks’ officials in banks’ headquarters of Saudi Arabia. Also, six focus groups were conducted; three with MB-application services users and three with non-users which were held in Riyadh College of Technology (RCT). In addition, a content analysis of MB-applications services was conducted to support suppliers’ perspectives regarding value propositions (service offering). A conceptual framework is developed for managing co-creation to illustrate practical application of the framework.The findings pointed to six factors that shape shape service suppliers’ ability to offer and deliver value via MB-applications, namely; brand image building, bank’s business vision, customer culture-orientation, bank’s internal environment, information technology system and positioning strategy. These factors combine to establish a value proposition for banks’ customers in the MB-applications services domain.Customer’s value creation as value in-use during usage emerged in different usage situations. A value framework incorporating value consumptions (Sheth et al., 1991a) is proposed. It identifies the main value-adding elements in m-applications and the primary drivers for adopting m-applications. Findings revealed that bank managers attempted to support customers’ value creation, which was reflected in MB-application content. However, support was constrained by some insufficient assumptions about customers and the m-commerce architecture. Factors that impede MB-applications use include consumers’ banking habits, perceived risk (security and privacy); usability hindrance, marketing and promotion, technical problems, and socio-cultural barriers. Implications are drawn for service delivery value perception and mobile marketing theory, and recommendations are made to service suppliers and commercial banks to achieve sustained returns of investment from MB-applications services

Coordination in Service Value Networks - A Mechanism Design Approach

The fundamental paradigm shift from traditional value chains to agile service value networks (SVN) implies new economic and organizational challenges. This work provides an auction-based coordination mechanism that enables the allocation and pricing of service compositions in SVNs. The mechanism is multidimensional incentive compatible and implements an ex-post service level enforcement. Further extensions of the mechanism are evaluated following analytical and numerical research methods

ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks: a literature review

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is a complex and vibrant process, one that involves a combination of technological and organizational interactions. Often an ERP implementation project is the single largest IT project that an organization has ever launched and requires a mutual fit of system and organization. Also the concept of an ERP implementation supporting business processes across many different departments is not a generic, rigid and uniform concept and depends on variety of factors. As a result, the issues addressing the ERP implementation process have been one of the major concerns in industry. Therefore ERP implementation receives attention from practitioners and scholars and both, business as well as academic literature is abundant and not always very conclusive or coherent. However, research on ERP systems so far has been mainly focused on diffusion, use and impact issues. Less attention has been given to the methods used during the configuration and the implementation of ERP systems, even though they are commonly used in practice, they still remain largely unexplored and undocumented in Information Systems research. So, the academic relevance of this research is the contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. An annotated brief literature review is done in order to evaluate the current state of the existing academic literature. The purpose is to present a systematic overview of relevant ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks as a desire for achieving a better taxonomy of ERP implementation methodologies. This paper is useful to researchers who are interested in ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Results will serve as an input for a classification of the existing ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Also, this paper aims also at the professional ERP community involved in the process of ERP implementation by promoting a better understanding of ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks, its variety and history

Design of an information system that connects retail banks and customers

The Swedish company Skyforge Financial Solutions AB (www.skyforge.se) is working on the new product MyBudget that will be part of an internet banking solution. The current version of the software extracts the spending information from the bank's transactions and then organize it graphically. My work is aimed to design a new concept the next major vision of MyBudget. It will be analyzed the stream of information between banks and customers, it will be evaluated if it is possible to have a deeper analysis of the available information about the customers so that the banks can improve their business, and then there will be some comments about the implication of the usage of this prototype by the customers in their way of spending money. The policy of research agreed with the company is to nd a "win-win" solution between banks and customers. Both of them should receive more information and then more advantages. MyBudget will have the technology that will make this possible. Sweden and nordic countries will be the rst reference market. The best practices of money management will be borrowed from companies processes to design solutions to improve the banks' customers spending behavior. This thesis is based on the work done in my whole university career but, mostly in the following courses taken in Lund University: - Strategic Management and Information Systems - Decision Support Systems - Design of Business Rules Systems - Business Intelligence and Securit

Towards a Service-Oriented Enterprise: The Design of a Cloud Business Integration Platform in a Medium-Sized Manufacturing Enterprise

This case study research followed the two-year transition of a medium-sized manufacturing firm towards a service-oriented enterprise. A service-oriented enterprise is an emerging architecture of the firm that leverages the paradigm of services computing to integrate the capabilities of the firm with the complementary competencies of business partners to offer customers with value-added products and services. Design science research in information systems was employed to pursue the primary design of a cloud business integration platform to enable the secondary design of multi-enterprise business processes to enable the dynamic and effective integration of business partner capabilities with those of the enterprise. The results from the study received industry acclaim for the designed solutions innovativeness and business results in the case study environment. The research makes contributions to the IT practitioner and scholarly knowledge base by providing insight into key constructs associated with service-oriented design and deployment of a cloud enterprise architecture and cloud intermediation model to achieve business results. The study demonstrated how an outside-in service-oriented architecture adoption pattern and cloud computing model enabled a medium-sized manufacturing enterprise to focus on a comprehensive approach to business partner integration and collaboration. The cloud integration platform has enabled a range of secondary designs that leveraged business services to orchestrate inter-enterprise business processes for choreography into service systems and networks for the purposes of value creation. The study results demonstrated enhanced levels of business process agility enabled by the cloud platform leading to secondary designs of transactional, differentiated, innovative, and improvisational business processes. The study provides a foundation for future scholarly research on the role of cloud integration platforms in enterprise computing and the increased importance of service-oriented secondary designs to exploit cloud platforms for sustained business performance

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Understanding organisation-CRM system misfits and their evolution : b a path to improving post-adoption CRM system usage

PhD ThesisSince the late 1990s, organisations have been increasingly investing in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to support their sales, marketing and customer service operations. Despite the significant growth in the acquisition of CRM systems and the widely accepted concepts of a CRM strategy, academics and practitioners repeatedly point to the high failure rates of CRM initiatives. Improving CRM systems’ use can provide organisations with considerable benefits. However, limited research has been directed towards understanding post-adoption CRM systems usage behaviour. This is an important and topical subject at a time when CRM has edged past Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) as the top application software investment priority and is expected to drive Enterprise System (ES) spending in 2013 and 2014. Using a multiple case study design methodology and Grounded Theory (GT) as the data collection and analysis technique, this process study strives to accomplish four primary research objectives. Firstly, it proposes a post-adoption CRM system usage process consisting of three phases (adaptation, exploitation, and benefits realization) and seven sub-phases (training assimilation, basic functionality discovery, basic functionality appropriation, advanced functionality discovery and appropriation, individual productivity enhancement, individual job objectives achievement, and company business objectives achievement) along which individual CRM system users can be placed. Secondly, it identifies ten misfit types (communication, supervision, user support, skill sets, commitment, functionality, data, strategy, organisation, and IT/business alignment) explaining for usage discrepancy among the user population. Thirdly, it looks at the evolution of those ten misfit types, and finds that their influence varies across the three post-adoption usage phases. For example, tool related misfits (e.g. functionality) appear early but tend to disappear by the end of the adaptation phase or the beginning of the exploitation phase, while company related misfits (e.g. communication of benefits, silo organisation) appear later in the exploitation phase, but seem to widen over time and significantly impact usage when not appropriately addressed. Finally, it identifies the organisation’s leadership style as a potential root cause explaining for CRM system usage behaviour

Repairing routines in enterprise system transformations : a sociomaterial perspective

Today, large implementation projects introducing Enterprise System (ES) technology in organizations are a very common phenomenon, typically driven by the idea that a myriad of benefits can be realized. Yet, after implementation, organizations often face challenging problems due to misalignments between “best practices” embedded in ES technology and existing work practices. For the individual user implementation of new technology thus implies considerable effort in terms of cognitively accomplishing appropriation. This complex process of appropriation was found to result in very strong links between technology and individuals that is described as a sociomaterial entanglement by some scholars. In addition, ES technology implementations do often not ‘simply’ introduce a new technology into an organization, but will likely replace a similarly complex, integrated legacy system. Given the strong link between individuals and technology, established while appropriating the legacy system, replacing old technology will imply the breaking of old associations as much as the building of new ones. Consequently, the point of departure is as much characterized by an achieved sociomaterial entanglement with the old technology as it is by the need to integrate new technology into work practices. It has long been argued that organizational routines are key to understanding changes of work practices in organizations as well as the associated process of organizational learning. While the question how organizational routines emerge and evolve over time is extensively studied, little is known about what happens when routines are disrupted. In addition, the substitution of a legacy system raises the question, how exiting entanglements influence changes in routines triggered by ES technology implementation. Addressing this gap in the literature, this thesis aims to understand how sociomaterial routines are repaired after the implementation of ES technology. To answer this question, a longitudinal interpretive case study of an ES technology implementation project in the retail banking division of a large German bank was conducted. The custom-built legacy system to be replaced by new ES technology due to technical and regulatory requirements had been in place for over thirty years before. Within the retail banking division the study focuses on the credit service unit, which offers back-office services to the bank’s customers and advisors. The case material consists of 57 semi-structured interviews and observation of 38 participants, collected at three different stages during the project (before go-live, immediately after go-live, and 6 month later). Using narrative networks as an analytical device helped capturing the complexity of routine changes related to ES technology implementation and provided the conceptual link between organizational routines and sociomaterial entanglements. Based on a comparison of relevant routines at different points in time during (post-) implementation, five categories of practices individuals (in different positions/at different organizational levels) employed to repair routine performances were identified. Two of the practices aimed directly at adapting routines. But, individuals also developed additional support practices (i.e., work practices, which are performed in addition to, but share common fragments with, the supported routine). Two more repair practices targeted the sociomaterial background based on which routines are established, that is they changed the basis on which those actants are delineated, which are subsequently forming routine fragments. Thus, in line with other studies of post-implementation behavior, the findings show that repairing routines is a collaborative achievement of many, if not all, individuals directly and indirectly affected by the technological change. Yet, the repair practices employed at different levels do not operate independently, but are highly interrelated. Like researchers studying other phenomena using a sociomaterial lens, both physical (e.g., use of printouts) as well as digital (e.g., functionality of new ES technology) materiality were found to be important constituents of problems and repair practice. Furthermore, time was similarly important for repairing routines as both the timing of routine executions as well as the unfolding of repair practices over time had major effects on the final success of recreating routines. The findings also highlight that repair practices are different with respect to their persistence. While those practices employed to handle the situation of change were more likely to disappear again (yet did not necessarily do so), those required for adapting routines and accommodating the new system most likely persist. In conclusion, repairing routines after ES technology implementation does not only involve replacing one routine fragment (related to the old technology) with a new fragment (based on new technology) and appropriately reincorporating this new fragment into an otherwise stable routine. To the contrary, repairing routines implicates far more profound changes to routines, which have to be negotiated both with the social and material environment, and further requires adjusting the sociomaterial background based on which routines are established. In addition, repair practices evolve over time and differ with respect to their persistence. Thus, repairing a routine has a social, material, and temporal dimension, which jointly have to be considered. This doctoral thesis contributes to theory by providing a conceptual account of ES Transformation, which offers an explanation of how a working ES is reestablished by repairing routines after the implementation of ES technology. These findings are also valuable for practitioners as they allow them to better understand and consequently better plan and manage ES Transformations