The impact of salient cultural practices on the outcome of IS implementation

This paper appears in Journal of Global Information Management. Copyright 2017, IGI Global, www.igi-global.com. Posted by permission of the publisher.A number of information system (IS) studies have adopted organisational culture (OC) theory to investigate IS implementations. The studies highlight that members will reach consensus or agreement in the use of an IS but also experience inevitable tensions and ambiguities in the use of the IS. However, literature related to IS implementation/OC has rarely examined the influence that the saliency of specific cultural practices may have on the success or failure of IS implementations. Using a case study approach, we adopted the “soft positivism” research philosophy to collect data, underpinned by Martin’s (1992) integration and differentiation perspectives of OC to study the organisational implementation of an IS. These perspectives served as interpretive lenses through which to explain how members’ salient behaviours towards an IS evolved during the implementation process. Our study augments the IS implementation/OC literature by demonstrating how salient cultural practices influence the outcome of IS implementation

Unpredictable Reconfigurations

A merger is the result of a strategic decision aimed at creating synergy. Notwithstanding mergers’ expected benefits, their outcomes are often beset by problems such as employees’ high levels of stress, dissatisfaction and resistance. Research suggests that these problems are often related to the issue of boundary management during the post-merger integration phase (PMI), which refers to the degree of integration required among the merging parties and the degree of autonomy, that each must retain for the merger to achieve synergy. The literature identifies information systems (IS) as being a key enabler of successful mergers and suggests that during PMI, new ISs that span the boundaries of the previously independent firms need to be implemented to facilitate a specific level of integration. Yet, there is a paucity of studies on the issue of boundary management at the information technology (IT) level during PMI. Adopting a sociomaterial perspective and based on a qualitative study within a healthcare organization, the authors find that post-merger practices were the result of dialectic processes of resistance to, and negotiation of, the IS reconfiguration after its implementation