Introduction to the special issue on “Technology management in a global context: From enterprise systems to technology disrupting operations and supply chains”

Abstract

Technology Management (TM) has long held an important place in operations management (OM) literature. Since the 1990s, TM topics have made up a substantial portion of the papers published in Journal of Operations Management (JOM). Today, the speed of development and innovative uses of new technologies across the globe create many new research opportunities and challenges (Heim et al., 2021), motivating the current special issue.

TM research often overlaps with other academic research fields (e.g., technology innovation in organization strategy, information technology [IT] in management information systems [MIS]). Yet, TM issues of interest to operations managers tend to differ in focus, detail, time horizon, and scope from the issues examined in those literatures. TM research in JOM usually delves into the within-firm interface between technology and process change as well as the performance impacts of technology on operations (as explained in the TM department's recent editorial [Heim et al., 2021]).

Technology concerns the application of resources and skills by humans to achieve specific aims. Burgelman et al. (2003) defined technology as “theoretical and practical knowledge, skills, and artifacts that can be used to develop products and services as well as their production and delivery systems.” Along similar lines, Gaimon (2008) defined technology as “the embodiment and deployment of technical and scientific knowledge and discoveries that lead to the creation of goods and services.” Changes in technology can lead to substantial changes in the organization and accomplishment of work (Browning, 2020; Heim & Peng, 2010; Jaikumar, 1988). TM¹ provides an inclusive term for managerial activities and academic research pertaining to the generation, deployment, and use of technology. Gaimon (2008) suggested the TM field addresses “how to develop, adapt, and exploit technological capabilities to create new or improved products or services to accomplish the strategic goals of an organization.”

Diverse contemporary technology developments provide many new research contexts and questions, seeding the research questions behind the innovative papers in this Special Issue. This diversity required that we keep an open mind regarding what research topics today reside among the scope of issues for TM research in OM and supply chain management (OM/SCM). The technology used today for process change may come in the form of software codes, hardware, material processing and handling technology, and consumer devices and enterprise applications. With an increasing need for global, real-time integration and coordination of demand and supply, operations managers must continue to evaluate and install new technology configurations to deploy processes that hopefully will accomplish their aims.

Ultimately, operations managers are responsible for making sure that the coordinated use of modern technology ensures the intended outcomes of operational systems, whether for local, idiosyncratic needs or global, enterprise needs. Today's operations managers are often actively involved in technology decisions, partnering with top management (and many other stakeholders) during technology selection, installation, and lifecycle decisions. Operations managers must nurture collaborative partnerships to ensure technology evaluation and implementation decisions are aligned with the sourcing and delivery needs of manufacturing and service operations.

With the above as context, we offer a collection of what we believe are excellent papers examining contemporary topics related to the special issue's theme of “Technology management in a global context: From enterprise systems to technology disrupting operations and supply chains.” We begin by first reviewing JOM's historical contributions to classic TM research themes and acknowledging the corpus of TM literature in JOM to which this SI contributes. This exercise then enables us to offer up initial responses to the questions, “What's missing?” and “What's next?”

The editorial is structured as follows. Section 2 discusses TM empirical research achievements to date, focusing on JOM. Section 3 introduces the papers in this special issue, suggests what research may still be missing, and points out where TM research efforts might focus next. Section 4 concludes and thanks the Reviewers and Editors who made this special issue possible.

As a prologue for the special issue, we gather existing JOM papers that fall within the historical scope of TM literature. In the early years of JOM (1980s), a focus on emerging technology and its consequences started with research enquiries into technology choice, group technology, and material requirements planning (MRP) systems. This research later transitioned toward impacts of advanced manufacturing technologies (AMTs) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems (1990s). Post-2000 research examined implications of internet-based technology implemented then, dramatically affecting modern OM/SCM processes. Overall, JOM authors have made significant contributions to insights about OM/SCM technology and TM roles in OM/SCM.

We chose our list of JOM's TM articles to discuss in a structured manner. To identify articles, we performed searches on JOM's Elsevier and Wiley search engine websites² using terms such as “technology”, “technology management”, “IT”, “information technology”, “technology strategy”, “technology outsourcing”, and terms specifically related to each topic area. We considered whether each suggested paper fit within TM. The articles were subjectively categorized into groups. We synthesize the articles for each group. Still, the following discussion should not be viewed as comprehensive in a scientific sense.³ We simply hope to convey the enormous breadth of TM research insights from JOM as well as provide context for the Special Issue.

We next summarize prior TM literature from JOM. We first group JOM's TM studies into classic TM topics about how to make sense of technology, evaluate and select technology, innovate via technology and diffuse technology to users, choose and adopt technology, design/redesign technology, use and react to technology, learn via technology, develop technology, integrate technology, improve firm performance via technology-enabled operations and supply chains, and outsource technology-enabled systems and services. We then group salient JOM TM studies by their technology application focus: manufacturing, service, retail, healthcare, enterprise/inter-enterprise, e-business, and new product/new service technology. We acknowledge papers in JOM often incorporate two or more TM themes, making any categorization of prior papers imprecise. Still, while our classification is by no means perfect, it is illustrative of the topical associations for historical TM papers from JOM.

Given the many ongoing developments in technology, technological innovation in products and services, and TM across the globe, we believe it is a fantastic time to work on TM research. We have enjoyed guiding the submitted papers through the review process and hope we have been fair with our guidance and decisions about which papers to ultimately include in this special issue. We also hope the reader will enjoy reading this special issue as much as we have enjoyed working through the process of developing the authors' manuscripts.

Finally, we note this special issue is the product of many individuals' efforts. We deeply thank the many Special Guest Editors, Associate Editors, Editorial Review Board members, and Reviewers who contributed their time and talents to serve in developmental roles for the special issue. Without their efforts to nurture the papers, this special set of papers about modern technology developments would not have come to fruition.

Special Issue Guest Editors:

Gregory R. Heim, Texas A&M University

Xiaosong (David) Peng, Lehigh University

Guangzhi Shang, Florida State University (handled one paper due to conflict of interest with the other Guest Editors)

Associate Editors:

Anupam Agrawal, Texas A&M University

Daniel Q. Chen, Texas Christian University

Adrian Choo, Michigan State University

David Dobrzykowski, University of Arkansas

Yan Dong, University of South Carolina

Cheryl Druehl, George Mason University

Matthias Holweg, University of Oxford

Kevin Linderman, Pennsylvania State University

Guanyi Lu, Florida State University

Rich Metters, Texas A&M University

Annibal Sodero, The Ohio State University

Rui Souza, Catholic University of Portugal

Martin Spring, Lancaster University

Gregory Stock, Northern Arizona University

Sriram Thirumalai, Texas Christian University

Stephan Wagner, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich

Frank Weingarten, ESADE Business School

Kefeng Xu, The University of Texas at San Antonio

Special Issue Guest Associate Editors:

Ednilson Bernardes, West Virginia University

Jun Li, University of Michigan

Editorial Review Board and Ad Hoc Reviewers:

George Ball, Indiana University

Aaron Bonnett, Texas A&M University

Alistair Brandon-Jones, University of Bath

Carlos Candido, University of Algarve

Tsan-Ming Choi, National Taiwan University

Howard Chuang, National Chengchi University

Yun-Kung Chung, Yuan-Ze University

Pamela Danese, University of Padova

Xin (David) Ding, Rutgers Business School

Michael Dixon, Utah State University

Kevin Dooley, Arizona State University

Necati Ertekin, University of Minnesota

Shaokun Fan, Oregon State University

Jordana George, Texas A&M University

Jing Gong, Lehigh University

Jury Gualandris, Western University

Xiaowen Huang, Miami University

Noyan Ilk, Florida State University

Xingzhi Jia, Renmin University of China

Justin Kistler, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Maneesh Kumar, Cardiff University

Hugo Lam, The University of Liverpool

Benn Lawson, University of Cambridge

Seung Jun Lee, Chung-Ang University

Xiaojin Liu, Virginia Commonwealth University

Mayukh Majumdar, University of San Diego

Erika Marsillac, Old Dominion University

Brett Massimino, Virginia Commonwealth University

Saif Mir, Lehigh University

Ujjal Mukherjee, University of Illinois

Adegoke Oke, Arizona State University

Carrie Queenan, University of South Carolina

Yoonseock Son, University of Notre Dame

Jon Stauffer, Texas A&M University

Fabian Sting, Erasmus University

Caroline Swift, University of Delaware

Frédéric Thiesse, University of Würzburg

Sriram Venkataraman, University of South Carolina

Ivanka Visnjic, ESADE Business School

Matthew Walsman, Rutgers University

Lan Wang, University of Miami

Urban Wemmerlov, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Xun Xu, California State University, Stanislaus

Yang Yang, University of Texas at El Paso

Dawei (David) Zhang, Lehigh University

Zuopeng (Justin) Zhang, University of North Florida