What do technologies do in organisations?
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Transcript of What do technologies do in organisations?
11 April 2023 What do technologies do? @DuncanChapple 1
WHAT DO TECHNOLOGIES DO IN ORGANISATIONS?
Duncan Chapple
11 April 2023 What do technologies do? @DuncanChapple 2
Comparison of three views
Ciborra• Management approach
focusses on control• Infrastructures act in
themselves• 2000
Crabtree et al • BPR misses the real world• Use ethnography to map
reality
• 2001
Kallinicos• ERP aims to unify the
organisation• Human control is limited
• 2004
Common focus on large-scale corporate IT systems
Shared critical view of the managerial viewAdvocates of starting from ‘as is’, rather than ‘to be’
11 April 2023 What do technologies do? @DuncanChapple 3
“THE CONTROL APPROACH DOES NOT ALWAYS WORK”
Claudio Ciborra reviews the managerial literature
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‘Managerial’ viewpointUnoriginal approaches in cases studied, sharing:• Interweaving of the
physical infrastructure and the processes and software that support BPR
• Processes frozen into the infrastructure
• Clearly marked pyramids of technologies
• Varying reach and scope:• Utility: cost efficient• Dependence: core
processes• Enabling: new processes
• Strategic alignment of IT with the business
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Two ‘managerial’ styles
Normative approachesIT “portfolio management”• Investing in infrastructure,
systems, technologies and applications
• Balancing risk to generate value
• Analyse, transform and envision
• Typically based on business maxims
• ‘relentless cost reduction’• ‘continuous innovation’
Management by dealsAccounts for 50% of cases
Deals to balance short-term needs and powerful groups• A free market for
infrastructure formation• Uneven development of
infrastructure• Supports systems that are:
• Ineffective • Utility• Dependent• … but not Enabling
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Problems identified in cases
The socio-technical everyday
• Rigid alignment or flexibility?• Bricolage (1996)• What is infrastructure?• What are the boundaries?• Independent actors abound• Institutions, not just ‘services’
No development from scratch
• What pre-exists influences design of the new
• ‘Open’ and ‘closed’ systems both pre-exist
• IS research uses rhetoric
• Tinkering not strategic alignment
‘De-worlded’ managerialism
fails
• Strategy and technology drift apart
• Alignment is hard to implement• Leadership is
missing• Technology drifts
out of control
We regard the geometrical models as a superstructure world, as outcomes of an idealisation process
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What is observed in the cases, but absent in managerialism?
Caring actors
Hospitality: coping with ambiguity
Cultivation: tensions +
resources innovation
Liquid portfolio?
Asset synergy!
‘Agendas’ versus the
infrastructure
Strategy emerges from
implementation
Make the double loop
real
Align the human and non-human
components
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“THE CONTROL APPROACH WORKS ONLY WHEN DENIED”
Bottom line:-
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“BPR IS INADEQUATE FOR THE PURPOSE”
Andy Crabtree et al
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BPR & QuickmapsBusiness Process Reengineering • In 2001, a popular analytical
solution for the generation of process requirements for builders of systems focussed on customer value
• Maps obscure human work processes
• ‘as-is’ maps are transformed into ‘to-be’ maps
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BPR fails in practice.
Case study field notes
• Managers want models to best reflect their own staff’s activity
• Quickmaps don’t describe it
• However, realised processes are contingent
• Complex and negotiated• Trading effort for favourability• Based not on optimal
procedures but on adequate relationships between actors
Explicating processes
• Ethnography makes sociality visible
• Explicating the social organisation of work shows ‘what is really going on’
• Thus can show how to resolve problems
• Seeing the social world from participants’ viewpoints
• Recognisable and corrigible• Available to design
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“ETHNOGRAPHY MAY BE COMPLIMENTARY TO BPR”
Bottom line:-
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“ERP IS A TECHNOLOGY OF REGULATION NOT INNOVATION”
Jannis Kallinicos
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Procedural visions of ERP and human agency
Methods & tools for managerialism
Double binds that produce drifts
Implementation-focussed literature
overlooks a lot
• Reconstruction of the ecology of micro-tasks
• No isolated acts with ERP• Little space for behaviour
• Managerial literature bypasses the complexities
• Side-effects produce unimagined directions
• Integration also undermines
• Implications for human work• Interaction with outside
systems• Organisations are not made of
functions and procedures
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Impact on organisational choices
Functional prerequisites
Huge level of procedural specification• Core and support
processes are performatively embedded in ERP systems
• Practise is disembodied• ERP look inwardly, to
produce manageability
External adaptation
Responsiveness to the environment• Procedures are
inadequate and need modification
• ERP hinders humans’ need to frame situations, inhibiting learning
• Organisations lose innovation and learning
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“ERP PRIVILEGES PROCEDURE OVER LOCAL KNOWLEDGE”
Bottom line:-
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Resources
Reading• Ciborra, C. (2000). From control to drift : the dynamics of corporate
information infastructures / Claudio U. Ciborra [and others], Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Crabtree, A., M. Rouncefield and P. Tolmie (2001). "'There's something else missing here': BPR and the Requirements Process." Knowledge & Process Management 8(3): 164-174.
• Kallinikos, J. (2004). Deconstructing information packages, Emerald. 17: 8-30.
Bricolage• Ciborra, C. U. (1996). "The Platform Organization: Recombining Strategies,
Structures, and Surprises." Organization Science 7(2): 103-118.
Discussion
Follow-up points to @DuncanChapple