Managing the Tension between Standardization and Customization in IT-enabled Service Provisioning: A Sensemaking Perspective

The outsourcing literature has offered a plethora of perspectives and models for understanding decision determinants and outcomes of outsourcing of business processes. While past studies have contributed significantly to scholarly research in this area, there are an insufficient number of studies that are provider centric. Consequently, there is a need to understand how service providers address a core challenge: to achieve scalable growth by developing standardized offerings that can be sufficiently customized to meet the unique demands of individual customers. This study explores how patterns of collective action within and between a provider and two of their largest customers relate to the tension between standardization and customization of information technology (IT)-enabled service provisioning. Specifically, it investigates the relationship between such behavioral patterns and the development of an enterprise architecture designed to address the tension between standardization and customization. A socio-cognitive sensemaking framework consisting of six core properties provides the analytical lens through which the relationship is investigated. The study adopts an interpretive case study methodology guided by the assumption that distinct dimensions of the social world exist, but understanding them comes from inter-subjective interaction between researcher and subject. The approach adopts a combination of literal and theoretical replication strategies (Yin 1994) to help identify similarities and dissimilarities during cross case comparison. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews, direct observations, participant observations, and analysis of documentation and archival records. Our findings suggest that localized action at the expense of global coordination exacerbates the tension between standardization and customization. Furthermore, attempts to address the tension through the logics of spatial and temporal separation proved largely ineffective, as these initiatives put added pressure on the sensemaking processes responsible for guiding collective action. Our findings further suggest that a paradigm modification might be useful for service providers, where they shift their focus from reducing equivocality to improving their internal ability to respond to it. The results of this study contribute to a large body of outsourcing literature that has too often neglected a provider centric perspective. By uncovering key factors that exacerbate the tension within and between organizations, and providing practical methods for addressing them, this study also offers valuable insight for practicing managers

ORGANIZATIONAL BOUNDARIES, INDUSTRY FRAGMENTATION, AND ELECTRONIC PERSONAL HEALTH RECORDS

This research-in-progress paper reports on an in-depth case study that integrates literatures from health care policy, information systems, and strategic management to explore how an entrepreneurial firm shapes its organizational boundaries in the context of the complicated healthcare ecosystem in the United States. In doing so, we investigate the implications of boundary shaping decisions on the development and deployment of an electronic personal health record (ePHR) system. The growing call for the use of ePHR systems is based on the logic that providing personalized, timely healthcare information that supports an incentive-based compliance program will not only lower healthcare costs but lead to healthier individuals and improved organizational performance. However, as mentioned in this paper, populating ePHR systems is a huge data integration challenge that requires the successful coordination of many players with potentially competing objectives. By adopting the perspective of a startup firm within this context, we illuminate the impact of industry fragmentation and competing goals and objectives within the health care context, and show the importance of boundary decisions that promote cooperation and tight integration to facilitate the information flows needed to populate employer sponsored ePHR systems

A new comparison between solid-state thermionics and thermoelectrics

It is shown that equations for electrical current in solid-state thermionic and thermoelectric devices converge for devices with a width equal to the mean free path of electrons, yielding a common expression for intensive electronic efficiency in the two types of devices. This result is used to demonstrate that the materials parameters for thermionic and thermoelectric devices are equal, rather than differing by a multiplicative factor as previously thought

Developing IS Enabled Capabilities for a BPO Vendor: A Case Study

The outsourcing literature has offered a plethora of perspectives and models for understanding decision determinants and outcomes of outsourcing of business processes. While past studies have contributed significantly to scholarly research in this area, there are an insufficient number of studies that explore how information systems can be used to facilitate service provisioning. Consequently, there is a need to understand how vendors develop IS enabled capabilities that allow them to address a core challenge: to achieve scalable growth by developing standardized offerings that can be sufficiently customized to meet the unique demands of individual customers. This in-depth case study leverages an organizational sensemaking framework to explore IS enabled capability development in one of the largest business process outsourcing (BPO) vendors in the world

Panel: Business process management education in academia: Its status, its challenges and its future

In recent years, hospitals have begun to invest in RFID systems to control costs, reduce errors, and improve quality of care. Despite the obvious benefits of RFID in healthcare settings, potential obstacles to effective deployment also exist. The purpose of this study is to systematically understand how hospitals can apply RFID to transform work practices and address cost, safety, and quality of care issues, most notably in inventory management. We leverage an interdisciplinary framework to explore adoption and use of RFID at multiple levels of analysis and adopt a multi-method approach to explore the research questions guiding this study. Our study is expected to contribute to a growing body of research related to the adoption and use of IT in healthcare settings and the enabling role of IT for innovating work practices and improving process performance

RFID-ENABLED CAPABILITIES AND THEIR IMPACT ON HEALTHCARE PROCESS PERFORMANCE

In recent years, hospitals have begun to invest in RFID systems to control costs, reduce errors, and improve quality of care. Despite the transformative impact that RFID may have in healthcare settings, few studies have examined how and why this change may occur. The purpose of this study is to systematically understand how RFID can transform work practices and address cost, safety, and quality of care issues, most notably in inventory management. We leverage a sociomateriality framework to explore the causal linkages that connect the material properties of RFID with the behavioral changes that are observed through its use. By linking the material properties of RFID with innovations in existing practices, we provide a data-driven account of how and why RFID is useful in this setting. In doing so, we also contribute to recent work by IS scholars who argue for a reconfiguration of conventional assumptions regarding the role of technology in contemporary organizations. By adopting this perspective, we recast the issue of whether or not IT matters, and instead offer interesting and useful insight into how and why it does

Exploring Transition in Healthcare Information Systems: A Process Perspective on RFID-Enabled Change

This research-in-progress article reports on an ongoing investigation that explores the transition from RFID-enabled transactional systems to RFID-enabled strategic systems in healthcare settings. By adopting a comparative case study approach and a process oriented perceptive, this research explores the underlying causal mechanisms that shape transition processes in this ever important industry. By developing deep insight into the factors that shape transition processes in healthcare, our research aims to generate key findings that are useful for both academic and practitioner audiences. By informing thinking in these areas, we hope to assist healthcare organizations in leveraging the strategic advantages offered by RFID technologies

Aiming at a Moving Target: IT Alignment in Toy Companies

For global companies that compete in high-velocity industries, business strategies and initiatives change rapidly, and thus the CIO struggles to keep the IT organization aligned with a moving target. In this paper we report on research-in-progress that focuses on how the CIO attempts to meet this challenge. Specifically, we are conducting case studies to closely examine how toy industry CIOs develop their IT organizations’ assets, competencies, and dynamic capabilities in alignment with their companies’ evolving strategy and business priorities (which constitute the “moving target”). We have chosen to study toy industry CIOs, because their companies compete in a global, high-velocity environment, yet this industry has been largely overlooked by the information systems research community. Early findings reveal that four IT application areas are seen as holding strong promise: supply chain management, knowledge management, data mining, and eCommerce, and that toy CIO’s are attempting to both cope with and capitalize on the current financial crisis by more aggressively pursuing offshore outsourcing than heretofore. We conclude with a discussion of next steps as the study proceeds

Comparison of DSMC and CFD Solutions of Fire II Including Radiative Heating

The ability to compute rarefied, ionized hypersonic flows is becoming more important as missions such as Earth reentry, landing high mass payloads on Mars, and the exploration of the outer planets and their satellites are being considered. These flows may also contain significant radiative heating. To prepare for these missions, NASA is developing the capability to simulate rarefied, ionized flows and to then calculate the resulting radiative heating to the vehicle's surface. In this study, the DSMC codes DAC and DS2V are used to obtain charge-neutral ionization solutions. NASA s direct simulation Monte Carlo code DAC is currently being updated to include the ability to simulate charge-neutral ionized flows, take advantage of the recently introduced Quantum-Kinetic chemistry model, and to include electronic energy levels as an additional internal energy mode. The Fire II flight test is used in this study to assess these new capabilities. The 1634 second data point was chosen for comparisons to be made in order to include comparisons to computational fluid dynamics solutions. The Knudsen number at this point in time is such that the DSMC simulations are still tractable and the CFD computations are at the edge of what is considered valid. It is shown that there can be quite a bit of variability in the vibrational temperature inferred from DSMC solutions and that, from how radiative heating is computed, the electronic temperature is much better suited for radiative calculations. To include the radiative portion of heating, the flow-field solutions are post-processed by the non-equilibrium radiation code HARA. Acceptable agreement between CFD and DSMC flow field solutions is demonstrated and the progress of the updates to DAC, along with an appropriate radiative heating solution, are discussed. In addition, future plans to generate more high fidelity radiative heat transfer solutions are discussed