Identity ambiguity and the promises and practices of hybrid e-HRM project teams

The role of IS project team identity work in the enactment of day-to-day relationships with their internal clients is under-researched. We address this gap by examining the identity work undertaken by an electronic human resource management (e-HRM) 'hybrid' project team engaged in an enterprise-wide IS implementation for their multi-national organisation. Utilising social identity theory, we identify three distinctive, interrelated dimensions of project team identity work (project team management, team 'value propositions' (promises) and the team's 'knowledge practice'). We reveal how dissonance between two perspectives of e-HRM project identity work (clients' expected norms of project team's service and project team's expected norms of themselves) results in identity ambiguity. Our research contributions are to identity studies in the IS project management, HR and hybrid literatures and to managerial practice by challenging the assumption that hybrid experts are the panacea for problems associated with IS projects

Organizational Routines Development and New Venture Performance

To better understand how entrepreneurial ventures vary as they evolve, we introduce and develop the concept of an organizational routine in a prototypical state, a protoroutine. Protoroutines allow experienced new ventures (but not inexperienced start-ups) to economize on decision-making and execution time in problem solving by drawing from an inventory of prior solutions to challenges. Protoroutines are not, however, tailored to the challenge at hand. We embed protoroutines into a simulation-based model featuring agents with differing decision-making speeds and abilities of exploring more distant solutions, two parameters influenced by founding team characteristics. Search speed and distance are typically traded off against each other at the team design level. Protoroutines may therefore be particularly helpful in organizational contexts in which it is optimal to have both search speed and distance. We characterize the organizational contextual configurations along the dimensions of environmental turbulence and decision complexity in which protoroutines, search speed, and search distance are associated with elevated (and dampened) organizational performance. One important conclusion is that decision-making speed can be a valuable organizational resource across organizational environments. Overall, our agent-based model and simulation results deepen our understanding of how and with what performance consequence new ventures develop

Earth observing system. Data and information system. Volume 2A: Report of the EOS Data Panel

The purpose of this report is to provide NASA with a rationale and recommendations for planning, implementing, and operating an Earth Observing System data and information system that can evolve to meet the Earth Observing System's needs in the 1990s. The Earth Observing System (Eos), defined by the Eos Science and Mission Requirements Working Group, consists of a suite of instruments in low Earth orbit acquiring measurements of the Earth's atmosphere, surface, and interior; an information system to support scientific research; and a vigorous program of scientific research, stressing study of global-scale processes that shape and influence the Earth as a system. The Eos data and information system is conceived as a complete research information system that would transcend the traditional mission data system, and include additional capabilties such as maintaining long-term, time-series data bases and providing access by Eos researchers to relevant non-Eos data. The Working Group recommends that the Eos data and information system be initiated now, with existing data, and that the system evolve into one that can meet the intensive research and data needs that will exist when Eos spacecraft are returning data in the 1990s