Reflections on digital innovation

The paper by Henfridsson et al. opens up a new agenda for IS research on the content and process of digital innovation. The crucial element in their perspective is the role of recombination in innovation. They supplement an emphasis on design recombination with a symmetrical emphasis on use recombination. While supporting Henfridsson et al.s overall argument, I point out how central parts overlap with and are extended in disciplines outside IS research

Living with technology

abstract not available

CROSS-CONTEXTUAL USE OF INTEGRATED INFORMATION SYSTEMS

The international industry of engineering products and services is characterized by high complexity and competition. Corporations that expand globally have experienced that managing interdependent activities and business processes across several countries requires an effective deployment of advanced information technology. Whereas the literature has described implementation of global information systems as a means to coordinate and control the business processes, empirical studies have shown that introducing a large-scale information systems involves several managerial challenges when organizations are geographically dispersed. This paper studies deployment of a global enterprise system to support evolvement of global business processes. On the basis of a qualitative case study of a multinational corporation implementing an enterprise system across several geographical locations, we identify counteracting forces in the process of global standardization of IS and business processes and discuss how the organization try to manage these forces and challenges therein. The findings suggest that global business processes develop through diverse processes of learning and negotiation between local practices of use and infusion of the global enterprise system

Unity in Multiplicity: Towards Working Enterprise Systems

Enterprise systems are attractive exactly as they promise a stronger unity – integration, collaborationand standardization – across distinct and different organisational units of a business. However,empirical research on enterprise systems has documented convincingly how situated workaroundsundermine the unity of enterprise systems through local thus different practices and adoptions. Thisproduces an apparently paradoxical character of enterprise systems: unity in the face of multiplicity.Our contribution is (i) to outline a theoretical middle-position effectively resolving the paradox and(ii) identify and analyse empirical strategies for how the paradox gets resolved in practice. Theempirical basis for our study is a longitudinal (2007-2009) case study of a global oil and gas companywith 30.000 employees operating in 40 countries across 4 continents

The Nested Materiality of Environmental Monitoring

Present knowledge about the Arctic marine ecosystem is sparse. These areas are vast, remote, and subject to harsh weather conditions. We report from a three- year case study of an ongoing effort for real-time sub-sea environmental monitoring by a Norwegian oil and gas operator aimed to obtain permission to drill in Arctic Norway. The marine ecosystem is monitored through a network of sensors, communication links, and visualisation and analysis tools. We propose the concept of nested materiality to describe how ‘facts’ about the sub-sea environment are anything but neutral; they are intrinsically caught up with the material means by which they are known. Nested materiality draws on perspectives in sociomateriality but highlights (i) the distributed and interconnected infrastructure of the material means (as opposed to ar- tefact-centric), and (ii) a technology in-the-making (as opposed to black-boxed) that brings to the fore the empirical moments when materiality is questioned and unpacked