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

Digital Fluency in SMEs: A Typology and a Multi-Case Study

In the practitioner and the academic literatures, links between information technology (IT) adoption, IT use and digital fluency (DF) have been emphasized by a number of authors. However, there is a lack of understanding of what exactly digital fluency is, how it can be conceptualized and what role it plays in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Based on the DF literature and its underlying concepts such as skills, expertise and competencies, as well as on the SME literature, a multi-case study of three Canadian SMEs is conducted to empirically evaluate a typology of DF archetypes. The typology, that is based on a change agent perspective, has three archetypes. Results suggest that SMEs’ managers should focus on the complementarity nature of the cognitive, social, and technological dimensions of DF when assessing and developing their employees’ DF