Public ICT Innovations: A Strategic Ambiguity Perspective

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in the Journal of Information Technology . The definitive publisher-authenticated version, RAVISHANKAR, M.N., 2013. Public ICT innovations: a strategic ambiguity perspective. Journal of Information Technology, 28 (4), pp. 316 - 332, is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/jit.2013.18Public Information and Communications Technology (ICT) innovations are seen as having the potential to usher in a new era of technology-enabled models of governance in emerging economies. While it may be desirable for the implementation of such innovations to be underpinned by precise planning, structure and clarity, policy implementers in emerging economies are confronted instead by situations where ambiguous goals and means are standard. This paper considers high levels of ambiguity as a relatively enduring and intrinsic aspect of public ICT innovations in emerging economies. Drawing on an ethnographic study of Bangalore one, an innovative public ICT project implemented in Bangalore, India, the paper examines how strategic ambiguity is deployed by key public actors to chart the course of the implementation process and to steer it towards reasonable outcomes. Theoretically, the paper suggests that although strategic ambiguity is a precarious and unsettling condition in general, it can work effectively in contexts that are reasonably tolerant of ambiguous norms. The findings of the study also present arguments for why evaluation mechanisms need to be fundamentally reframed in order to assess the extent of implementation success of public ICT innovations in emerging economies

Seizing the opportunity: towards a historiography of information systems

Historical perspectives are only timidly entering the world of IS research compared to historical research in management or organisation studies. If major IS outlets have already published history-oriented papers, the number of historical papers – although increasing – remains low. We carried out a thematic analysis of all papers on History and IS published between 1972 and 2009 indexed on ABI and papers indexed in Google Scholar™ for the same period. We used a typology developed by theorists Üsdiken and Kieser, who classify historical organisation research into supplementarist, integrationist and reorientationist approaches. We outline their links with the epistemological stances well known in IS research, positivism, interpretivism and critical research; we then focus on their differences and historiographical characteristics. We found that most IS History papers are supplementarist descriptive case studies with limited uses of History. This paper then suggests that IS research could benefit from adopting integrationist and reorientationist historical perspectives and we offer some examples to illustrate how that would contribute to enriching, extending and challenging existing theories