olikaverktygkanunderlättaimplementeringenavettaffärssystem(enterpriceresourceplanning-­‐systems).Genomattappliceraenhetlighetsramverket(comonality-­‐frameworkforIT-­‐enabledchange)påfallstudienundersökervimedhjälpavbegreppetgränsobjekt(boundaryobjects)hursådanaverktygkanspelaenviktigrollförenlyckadimplementering.RättanpassadegränsobjektkanbidratillattskapaenförståelseförnyIT,samtintresseförattanvändaden.Efterendiskussionomdeempiriskafyndenpresenterarvirådtillpraktikerpåområdetochföreslårblandannatattverktygmedettvisuelltgränssnittärfördelaktigaimångasituationer.UppsatsensbidragtillforskningenbestårienutvecklingavenhetlighetsramverketgenomattvivisarpåhurgränsobjektpåverkardedimensionersomenligtramverketmåstegeshänsynvidenIT-­‐organisationsförändring.

Assessing the conditions of productivity of individual workers who process information and use IT has been a concern for many researchers. Prior studies have applied different theoretical foundations to study the relationship between IT use and productivity at individual level in post adoption scenarios and have provided mixed results. In the last decades, the proposition that there is a need for a set of factors to be changed in a synchronized fashion when using an IT system has received particular attention. Very little, however, is known about the configurations of these factors at individual level. To investigate this gap, we have designed a new research model of an information worker’s individual productivity when a more aligned IT system is used in a synchronized manner with both individual and organizational factors. The formulated research model is grounded on the complementarity theory, functioning here as a meta-theory guiding the linking of productivity theory, Kirton’s adaption-innovation theory, and several theoretical bodies on the structure of production processes and human resource management. The formulated model was tested in two empirical studies – a longitudinal quasi-randomized field experiment and an online experiment – conducted to investigate configurations of complementary factors that increase productivity when a new, more aligned IT system is used. Overall, the two studies shed important light on configurations of complementary factors and the improvement of the research design to study their impact on IT-enabled productivity. The obtained results contribute to the research that focuses on individual information worker IT-enabled productivity as well as research that rests on the complementarity theory with new configurations of complementary factors that, when matched correctly, can increase individual productivity of information workers. Eventually, the studies presented here advocate that further research is needed to increase our in-depth understanding of complementary factors and their impact on individual IT-enabled productivity of information workers.

EFunds Corporation is the third largest business process outsourcing (BPO) provider in India. Specializing in the financial services, retail and telecommunications industries, EFunds offers financial services, customer services and transaction intensive applications. In early 2005 EFunds was assessing how it could garner a larger share of the growing offshore BPO market. EFunds management was focusing on honing three distinctive competencies: robust IT support, business process expertise, and its unique customer qualification methodology. But to really grow its business EFunds also needed to help customers recognize how BPO could make them stronger.

Information technology (IT) is empowering consumers, service providers, and inventor teams with superior services. Various IT innovations are enabling diverse groups of people to search, exchange, and learn from information. In healthcare services, the context of the three essays of this dissertation, information resources are often not equally accessible to consumers, not transparent between patients and physicians, and hard to locate across technological domains that may be relevant to the development of breakthrough innovations. Focusing on empowering roles of IT in healthcare services, I develop a three-essay dissertation to study how IT can enable information access to (i) address health inequalities in developing regions of the world, (ii) strengthen the physician-patient relationship where patient trust in the physician has atrophied, and (iii) energize inventor teams in the development of medical device innovations. Essay 1 examines consumers’ awareness and use of mobile health that can empower consumers to access health advice information. Essay 2 investigates how online health consultation communities can empower physicians to build trust with patients, and gain social and economic advantages in competitive healthcare services. Essay 3 studies the role of digital capabilities to empower inventor teams in medical device companies by converting expertise of inventor teams into broad and deep knowledge capital and expanding knowledge production regarding medical device innovations. I adopt a pluralistic approach to collect data (surveys administered in multiple languages for Essay 1, scraping web data from online communities for Essay 2, and constructing a multisource archival panel dataset for Essay 3) and analyze data (multivariate analysis for Essay 1, multilevel modeling and econometrics for Essay 2 and Essay 3). The essays contribute to our understanding about the acceptance of empowering IT innovations, the empowering role of user-generated content in online communities for providers of credence services, and the empowering role of IT for inventor teams of healthcare innovations.

This research takes steps towards developing a new theory of organizational information management based on the ideas that, first, information creates ordering effects in transactions and, second, that there are multiple centers of authority in organizations. The rationale for developing this theory is the empirical observation that hospitals have great difficulty in managing information relating to transactions with patients. The research illustrates the detailed workings of an initial conceptual framework based on an action research project into the revenue cycle of a hospital. The framework facilitates a deeper understanding of how information technology can help to transform information management practices in complex organizations, such as hospitals. At the same time, this research adds to the literature on Polycentricity Theory by linking its two core concepts—multiple nested centers of decision making and context-dependent governance—with Transaction Cost Theory and information management theories to establish a new foundation for understanding the role of information technology in organizational contexts.

We have studied a global corporation that is implementing an IT-enabled change program which affect the whole organization. In this change, there exists many different perspectives that we divided into groups to enable analysis. The different perspectives hold differing missions and knowledge bases which in turn affect their respective understanding of the change and its purpose. In this study, we have divided perspectives according to two dimensions: program – project and business – IT. The aim has been to understand how these different perspectives affect change implementation. We have interviewed individuals from multiple positions in the organization to understand their view on what is happening in the organization and how they relate to the various issues found in the change program. We have found that there are many instances where misunderstanding can arise because the stakeholders involved in the change lack mutual understanding of each other’s perspectives. When there is an imbalance between perspectives, IT-enabled change is likely to become an IT roll-out and not an IT-related organizational change. We believe that when stakeholders of change broaden their awareness and understanding regarding the different perspectives that exist, they can enable coordination and cooperation between perspective groups. This will in turn help with successful change implementation.

Yes / Although IT-enabled dynamic capabilities (ITDCs) add value to firms operating in turbulent and rapidly changing environments, firms face several challenges in developing, deploying, and maintaining the right portfolio of ITDCs. Since ITDCs are not uniformly advantageous, firms need to make strategic decisions in order to accomplish the complex task of achieving optimal ITDC configurations. This conceptual paper draws on the strategic alignment perspective to identify the optimal configuration of ITDCs for a firm based on its business strategy orientation indicated by the Miles and Snow typology. This paper first explicates the theoretically ideal configurations of ITDCs based on the competitive strategy patterns associated with each Miles and Snow archetype and then develops a model for measuring the strategic fit of ITDCs. This paper contributes to the literatures on ITDCs and strategic alignment by identifying optimal ITDC configurations and by conceptualizing the strategic fit of ITDCs respectively.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore—from a managerial perspective—how IT-enabled change is designed, led, and sustained from-within an organisation. This is an issue of central concern because there is a considerable lack of research that directly incorporates IT in management and organisational change studies. In addition, earlier research has recurrently focused on abstract theorising, aggregated perspectives, and exploring organisational change from the outside, from-without. Consequently, the present body of research provides limited knowledge of how organisations in practice lead large-scale IT-enabled transformations. The thesis herein sets out to explore this question, and does so by following the change designers and agents of the telecommunications company Ericsson, that transformed its finance and accounting unit from a highly decentralised structure into a shared service centre structure (SSC) entitled: “The Global F&A Transformation Programme”. The formal transformation lasted three years, was enabled by an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, and was driven in the majority of Ericsson’s sub-units situated in more than 140 countries. Theoretically, this thesis addresses the research question: how do actors and structures influence large-scale IT-enabled change? The principal finding of the thesis is a four-stage analytical framework built on the concepts of common ground, common meaning, common interest, and common behaviour: The Commonality Framework for IT-enabled Change. The value of the framework is that it depicts the interplay between actors and structures on a micro-level. In doing so, the framework explains the different levels of complexity in a transformation and how they require different structures to be used, different activities to be performed, different skills to be applied, and different roles to be played. The framework can be used by both academics and practitioners to develop, assess, and improve IT-enabled change projects. In a broader perspective, the findings further suggest that change comes about as an upward spiral, within which the moving targets of IT and organisation are intimately interconnected. This reciprocal interconnectedness between IT and organisation across time implies that if changes are done to technological properties, this necessitates changes to the organisational properties, and vice versa. Organisations at the hands-on-level more or less have to change to make use of the IT-enabled advantages. Thus, successful IT-enabled change is more than the technology artefact per se, and requires thoughtful attentiveness not only to the technological and material side, but also to the organisational, social and human side of change. The theoretical contribution of this thesis is the in-depth exposition of different aspects and interplays between the properties of actors and structures from-within the organisation. The empirical contribution is the description of how contemporary multinational organisations initiate, lead, and sustain large-scale IT-enabled change. / The provided document is only the summary and introductory chapter of the thesis (i.e. excluding the five papers). If you want more information about the thesis as a whole please contact the author einar.iveroth@fek.uu.se.

This research applies institutional economics theory to management challenges arising in connection with e-business related transformational change. The research was carried out in response to widely recognised problems in managing IT-enabled change in complex organisations. A cyclic approach builds researcher competence in both the chosen theory, New Institutional Economics (NIE), and its application through a series of four contrasting case studies. The case situations, which derive from the researcher’s work as a technology management consultant, are treated as action research experiments which investigate e-business related transformational change in financial services, retail and government settings. A constructivist stance is adopted within the case situations with the researcher acting as a participant observer. Reflective practice is used to improve the experimental method for the case studies through the course of the research, leading to the use of participatory action research (PAR) for the final case. A literature review of NIE shows it to be loosely defined as a theory, so an analytic NIE framework is created to provide a cognitive model. This model is then modified and extended to produce a final theoretical framework. In parallel, a conceptual map of NIE is created from the research as a practical aid to illustrate NIE concepts and linkages. These two models, the theoretical framework and the conceptual map, evolve through the four case situations which were selected from a range of e-business consulting opportunities available to the researcher over the period of the research. The second case study drives the main development of the two models and draws out the necessary and complementary contributions of both transaction cost economics (TCE) and agency theory (AT) as parts of NIE, neither of which is sufficient on its own. The final case study demonstrates application to practice. The overall sequence of case studies shows the researcher’s cognitive growth from being a novice in the theory and its application in the first case through to a level of proficiency in applying NIE to the rigours of e-business practice in the final case. The research makes several contributions to knowledge. It makes a significant methodological contribution by bringing research methods developed for other forms of professional practice to the management discipline. It also makes a significant contribution to theoretical knowledge. It develops two theoretical models of NIE – a conceptual map and a theoretical framework – which present a way of linking NIE concepts in a meaningful way, and a structure by which NIE can be used in the analysis of highly complex organisational situations. These models clarify the complementary roles of TCE and AT, and indicate a reason why so many studies limited to TCE alone have been inconclusive. Applying NIE to the rigours of e-business management produces, in turn, a contribution to IT strategy formulation. The research makes a practical contribution by showing how NIE can be applied to e-business practice, subject to a number of significant caveats. NIE, as a descriptive theory, is shown to provide a powerful conceptual framework when combined with PAR, although both require deep knowledge and skill. In particular, adopting PAR as a case study method depends on an experienced, skilled and committed practitioner for its effective use. Finally, the research finds that NIE’s strengths as a framework for strategic analysis of large scale and complex e-business situations involving transformational change, which make it unduly sophisticated for less challenging situations, mean that NIE is suited to use by highly skilled, specialist consultants rather than by general managers.

In this thesis, a national information technology (IT) strategy applicable to Turkish construction industry for future implementation of IT is developed, advising guidance to current and future stakeholders but also researchers and decision makers to set the right priorities and pre-harmonization for IT in construction. Within this study, the present situation of the industry is discussed, so as to structure today&rsquo / s required industry abilities fulfilling tomorrow&rsquo / s demands and innovative IT solutions. Then, a coherent vision is developed for agile, model-based, knowledge driven Turkish construction industry. Following the analysis of IT trends and opportunities, a national IT strategy framework for the industry is specified. Finally / other country applications are examined to give direction for the developed strategy implementation approach.