20 research outputs found

    FROM THINKING TO TINKERING: THE GRASSROOTS OF STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS

    Get PDF
    When building a Strategic Information System (SIS), it may not be economically sound for a firm to be an innovator through the strategic deployment of information technology. The decreasing costs of the technology and the power of imitation may quickly curtail any competitive advantage acquired through SIS. On the other hand, the iron law of market competition prescribes that those who do not imitate superior solutions are driven out of business. This means that any successful SIS becomes a competitive necessity for every player in the industry. Tapping standard models of strategy analysis and data sources for industry analysis will lead to similar systems and enhance, rather than decrease, imitation. How then should a true SIS be developed? In order to avoid easy imitation, it should emerge from the grassroots of the organization, out of end-user hacking computing and tinkering. In this way, the innovative SIS is going to be highly entrenched with the specific culture of the firm. Top management needs to appreciate local fluctuations in system practices as a repository of unique innovations and commit adequate resources to their development, even if they fly in the face of traditional approaches. Rather than looking for standard models in the business strategy literature, SISs should be looked for in the theory and practice of organizational learning and innovation, both incremental and radical

    Reframing the Role of Computers in Organizations The Transaction Costs Approach

    Get PDF
    The traditional role of computer-based information systems is to provide support for individual decision making. According to this model, information is to be seen as a valuable resource for the decision maker faced with a complex task. Such a view of information systems in organizations does however fail to include such phenomena as the daily use of information for misrepresentation purposes. The conventional systems analysis methods; whether they be data- or decision-oriented, do not help in understanding the nature of organizations and their ways of processing information. This paper proposes what appears to be a more realistic approach to the analysis and design of information systems. Organizations are seen as networks of contracts which govern exchange transactions between members having only partially overlapping goals. Conflict of interests is explicitly admitted to be a factor affecting information and exchange costs. Information technology is seen as a means to streamline exchange transactions, thus enabling economic organizations to operate more efficiently. Examples are given of MIS, data base and office automation systems, where both the organization and its information system were jointly designed. These examples illustrate the power of the approach, which is based on recent research in the new institutional economics

    De Profundis? Deconstructing the Concept of Strategic Alignment

    Get PDF
    lost the ability to think or speak coherently words which the tongue has to employ in order to express any kind of daily opinion decompose in my mouth like rotten mushrooms.” Hugo von Hofmannstah

    Notes on improvisation and time in organizations

    No full text
    Business Process Re-engineering has not been able to eradicate improvisation from economic organizations. On the ashes of this failed program of modernization, it is high time to take a serious look at the phenomenon of improvisation: its structure, dynamics and forms of occurrence in both emergency and routine situations. The study of such a ubiquitous human practice reveals that even in highly structured organizations improvisation is a well grounded process that can be leveraged to face those situations where rules and methods fail. Improvisation, seen as an ex-temporaneous process, opens up alternative approaches to cope with time in business. ‘Lifting out' the constraints posed by clock time, one can envisage the importance of those ‘moments of vision' that represent the elusive core of entrepreneurial behaviour. In the background of impromptu action, as well as of a more authentic notion of time, lies what is missing from the managerial models in good currency: human existence and experience

    Les enjeux organisationnels des collecticiels

    No full text
    Ciborra Claudio U. Les enjeux organisationnels des collecticiels. In: NETCOM : Réseaux, communication et territoires / Networks and Communication Studies, vol. 9 n°2, août 1995. Expériences et perspectives de la téléactivité. pp. 349-351

    Towards a contingency view of infrastructure and knowledge: an exploration. Universiteit van Amsterdam, PrimaVera Working paper

    No full text
    Abstract IT infrastructures coupled with BPR initiatives have the potential of supporting and enabling new organizational forms and helping firms face the challenges of globalization. The management literature gives prescriptions of how to set up, implement, and use infrastructures to reach a new IT capability; diminish transaction costs; and obtain competitive advantage. However, the scant empirical basis of such literature goes hand in hand with the lack of a theory linking the deployment of infrastructure to the nature of the business and the industry. This study of the deployment and use of infrastructures in six large multinationals sets the ground for a contingency approach to the whole issue. The different implementation processes and applications reported by the case studies suggest that there is much more variety than the "one best way" recommended by the literature. The economic theories of standards and of the firm as a repository of knowledge are good candidates to explain qualitatively the empirical evidence

    From tool to Gestell 305 From tool to Gestell Agendas for managing the information infrastructure

    No full text
    Actually, Gestell concerns us very directly. Gestell is 
 more extant (seiender) than all the atomic energy, all the machines, more extant than the impact of organization, information and automation Introduction Since the second half of the 1990s IBM has been formulating and deploying an extensive new fabric of processes and tools in order to be able to operate efficiently on a worldwide basis as a global company. Consider one of the major components of such global business processes: customer relationship management (CRM). CRM consists of an array of processes that streamline all the activities between IBM and its customers across markets, product lines and geographies. It affects more than 120,000 employees worldwide and it is based on a variety of existing and new systems and applications that automate and link multiple business processes. The logic of CRM is quite straightforward, despite the myriad of activities it involves and people it affects. CRM is supposed to be the backbone of the successful completion of any business transaction IBM is engaged in: from the early opportunity identification to the order fulfillment and customer satisfaction evaluation. Thus, CRM prescribes what is needed to execute a full negotiation cycle around any customer transaction. In this respect, the ideas and models developed by CRM shows many features of a corporate infrastructur
    corecore