On the Diffusion of Administrative Innovation: Performance, Fashion, or Legitimacy

IT-enabled administrative innovation has been increasingly important to managers, both in the private and public sectors, asit is considered the “silver bullet” to revive organizations out of poor performance or turbulent times. This review articleexamines four alternative diffusion theories of administrative innovation, namely, the performance-and-then-legitimacydriventheory, the diminishing-mimetic-isomorphism theory, the fashion-and-then-abandon-by-performance theory, and theperformance-fashion-legitimacy theory. The conclusion is that each theory appears likely to hold only in certain conditions,and none of them comes out as the absolute explanation for the diffusion process. The possibility of multiple adoptionpathways or conditional diffusion trajectories is suggested, and future theoretical development as well as empirical research isneeded to understand the diffusion process

What is being Reinvented? Toward a Conceptual Model of Reinvention

Reinvention is a key process in innovation diffusion, but often underexplored compared to other innovation concepts. Several theoretical issues emerge, such as the perception of a reinvention black box, or the ambiguity of reinvention processes. This theoretical paper looks into those issues, specifically focusing on the nature of the reinvented innovation, and the processes involved. Innovation is conceptualized to include three elements: ideas, objects, and practices. Furthermore, three prominent reinvention processes are suggested: translation, modification, and adaptation. A conceptual model of reinvention is proposed to outline the relationships between innovation ideas, objects and practices under reinvention processes over time. The paper contributes to prior studies on post-adoption behaviors, as well as general innovation adoption studies and their quest for breakthroughs and new paradigms

Making Connections: A Typological Theory on Enterprise Architecture Features and Organizational Outcomes

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is an important concept, promising various benefits such as reducing redundancy in IT investments, aligning IT strategy and business strategy, and enhancing communication between IT specialists and business leaders. Experts suggest that the more mature an organization’s EA, the greater benefit the organization will achieve. However, because EA is a conceptual innovation, organizations have more flexibility in implementing EA. Thus, it is possible that the expected outcomes from implementing EA depend not only on how well EA is implemented, but also on the kinds of EA that are implemented (i.e., EA features). In this preliminary study, we propose a typological theory that links EA features with organizational outcomes. We analyze five popular branded EA frameworks to identify the types of EA features and frameworks that are connected to specified outcomes. Several hypotheses are presented, and future research is needed to further connect EA features to organizational outcomes

Effectiveness of Health Communication Technology on Compliance Disposition of Covid-19 Guidelines

Recent research has mostly examined the role of health communication technology (HCT) in patient empowerment and in producing patient-focused outcomes. This study examines HCT in a larger context where it is used as a tool to improve public health. The objective is to examine how HCT is used to monitor Covid-19’s spread, and how social factors affect individual assessment of HCT and individual compliance disposition of Covid-19 guidelines. Analyzing data collected from 360 HCT users suggests that the information and system quality of HCT indeed impact users’ assessment of its effectiveness and their compliance disposition. However, such effects are strongly mediated by social factors: Peer influence and government trust can sway an individual’s cognitive judgments of Covid-19 regardless of HCT’s impacts. The findings highlight the importance of social factors in pandemic management and the need to socialize health informatics to make them more effective

Translation of Enterprise Architecture Concept to Facilitate Digital Transformation Initiatives in Vietnam: Processes, Mechanisms and Impacts

Governments around the world have increasingly adopted digital transformation (DT) initiatives to increase their strategic competitiveness in the global market. To support successful DT, governments have to introduce new governance logics and revise IT strategies to facilitate DT initiatives. In this study, we report a case study of how Enterprise Architecture (EA) concepts were introduced and translated into practices in Vietnamese government agencies over a span of 15 years. This translation process has enabled EA concepts to facilitate various DT initiatives such as e-government, digitalization, to name a few. Our findings suggest two mechanisms in the translation process: a theorization mechanism to generalize local practices into field-level abstract concepts, making them easier to spread, while a contextualization mechanism unpacks these concepts into practical, adaptable approaches, aligning EA with adopters\u27 priorities and increasing its chances of dissemination. Furthermore, our findings illustrate how translation happened when the initial concepts are ambiguous and not-well-understood by adopters. In this situation, there is a need for widespread experiments and sense-making among pioneers before field- and organizational-level translation can occur

Effects of Digital Transformation Initiatives on IT Performance: Evidence from US State Governments

For governments around the world, digital transformation (DT) initiatives have been a cornerstone in a plan to gain strategic competitiveness in the global market. However, DT initiatives have a high failure rate, and prior studies have suggested that DT initiatives are disruptive and evolutionary by nature, requiring a longitudinal examination of DT initiatives to fully understand how their effects unfolded over time. In this exploratory study, we use an event study analysis to unveil the effects of DT initiatives on IT performance over a decade in 25 US state governments. The results suggest that DT initiatives only have a significant and positive effect on radical transformation of IT performance, but not for incremental transformation of IT performance. The findings support a revolutionary perspective on effects of DT initiatives and suggest that for public organization, radical transformation is worth considering despite of the risks

Social Norms and Misinformation Sharing of Politicized Products

Misinformation has been on the rise, and in many cases, misinformation is intentionally shared for political reasons. This phenomenon first started with political news but now has spread in consumer products. To understand how misinformation sharing occurs differently between politicized versus non-politicized products, we conducted an experiment and survey 800 respondents in an online crowdsourcing platform. The results show that for a politicized product, individual bias disposition and social norms indeed sway an individual’s evaluation of information credibility, her trust and intention to share. However, this effect is not observed for non-politicized products. This call for more research to understand the role of social norms in stopping the spread of misinformation

Bridging the Gap between Education and Practice: The Case of iD Lab

Universities are currently under pressure from multiple fronts: students questioning their value propositions due to rising tuition costs, employers being frustrated at the skill gap and lack of experience in recent graduates, and communities asking for higher societal impacts from local universities. Facing these challenges, universities have focused on experiential learning to bridge the gap between education and practice while increasing community engagement. In this paper, we use a case study approach to present the experiential learning model at iD Lab, DePaul University. The success of the iD Lab comes from a tight coupling of experiential learning and engaged scholarship. Three illustrative projects show keys to success are good relationships with the clients and high-quality product deliverables

Achieving Strategic Innovation through Information Technology Outsourcing: A Configurational Approach

Recent Information Technology outsourcing (ITO) literature identifies an inherent tension in outsourcing: firms that use ITO to gain efficiency (e.g., cost reductions) will find it difficult to achieve strategic innovation through ITO. Best practices for efficiency gaining (e.g., having a detailed contract) can in fact inhibit firms’ ability to develop new products, services, or enter new markets. To date, few empirical studies examine this paradox. Our study adds to this growing literature by using a configurational approach to examine 41 large US enterprises of their ITO practices to achieve strategic innovation. Our findings suggest that a “mediated multi-outsourcing” strategy can indeed lead to strategic innovation. Moreover, contrary to the extant literature’s suggestion that detailed contracts can be an inhibitor to strategic innovation, we show that not using detailed contracts will in fact lead to the lack of strategic innovation. Our findings call for further research to understand the enablers and inhibitors of strategic innovation through ITO

Outsourcing for Sustainable Performance: Insights from Two Studies on Achieving Innovation through Information Technology and Business Process Outsourcing

(1) Background: To obtain sustainable performance through outsourcing, organizations must balance the inherent tension between pursuing cost-saving initiatives (i.e., efficiency) and pursuing innovative initiatives (e.g., developing new products). This study aims to explore this tension by exploring different ways that organizations can pursue both efficiency and innovativeness, through their IT outsourcing (ITO) and business process outsourcing (BPO). (2) Methods: This study utilizes a configurational approach in two inductive studies, both using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). The first study qualitatively compares 27 firms currently doing ITO, while the second study compares 60 firms doing either ITO or BPO. (3) Results: Our findings suggest three configurations, or combination of conditions, that enable efficiency and innovation through ITO and BPO. For ITO, firms can use a best-of-breed or a mediated multi-outsourcing configuration to enable innovation; however, firms can only use a direct multi-outsourcing configuration to enable innovation through BPO. (4) Conclusions: The study is among the first to explore both ITO and BPO practices that enable innovation and efficiency simultaneously (sustainable performance). In contrast with prior studies, all three aforementioned configurations suggest that having detailed outsourcing contracts is a necessary but not sufficient condition for innovation through outsourcing