Information and Organization最新文献

To reduce technical and task interdependencies, modularization has been considered important in OSS development. However, the existing literature implicitly takes a static view that software structure and organizational structure are established early on and change slowly over time, if at all. Such a view does not fully reflect the complex and dynamic nature of software development and tends to overlook the role played by human agents as they ramp involvement up and down over time. This study considers that coordination practice plays an important role in altering technical interdependencies in OSS development. This study investigates coordination practices that result in changes in software coupling—in particular, increases in software coupling. This study automatically analyzes the code in 72 software releases and 1033 task episodes of three successful OSS projects—GNU grep, IPython, and Scikit-image. This study takes a fine-grained practice-oriented perspective that views the way that the work is done as constituting the organization. In our conceptualization, OSS contributors use a configuration of multiple organizational elements, enacted and varying across specific episodes of practice. In line with this perspective, this study takes a configurational approach, uses fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to analyze episodes that led to decreases, no changes, and increases in software coupling during the inter-release periods in which the level of software coupling increased significantly, which we call focal period. We find that co-work involving multiple individuals tends to result in code that adds technical dependencies (increases in software coupling) during the focal period. To illustrate this beyond our fuzzy-set analysis, we present and discuss three episodes in narrative detail. The fine-grained, configurational analysis in this study supports the idea that the organizing process is ongoing enactment. In this study, OSS systems are an amalgam of code that builds up in different episodes each possibly different organizational configurations, rather than thinking of the OSS systems or projects as static or singular.

AI systems are increasingly being deployed in organizations to support customer service (CS) departments. However, in practice, the introduction of AI tools often fails to meet these expectations and results in negative consequences, such as worker resistance and dissatisfaction. Yet we have little understanding of the process of how and why initially positive design intentions of AI tools result in negative consequences. Building on a qualitative in-depth case study of a Chinese firm introducing an AI tool in sales, we found that whereas the AI tool's initial design seemingly intended to lead to salespeople's empowerment and first achieved respective outcomes, over time the tool was appropriated for managerial control. We show that this devolution emerged organically from a growing managerial awareness of the affordances that the AI tool offered managers to perform their work better. Our study contributes to the literature on AI by highlighting the potential dangers of AI tools and emphasizing the importance of including workers in the AI tool's design and implementation phases.

Firms are increasingly adopting digital transformation as a strategic priority. However, the path to successful transformation remains uncertain for many organizations. This paper examines the establishment and evolution of competency centers in two case study organizations, historically used in enterprise systems, in addressing the complexity and challenges of digital transformation. The interactions within these competency centers are analyzed through assemblage theory to understand the emergent relations between heterogeneous parts (technology, people, and organization) and the dynamic processes of new configurations. The insights from this research show the critical role of the competency center in any enterprise system's success and how it could continue playing a central role in future digital transformation initiatives. By providing a new lens to examine these issues, the assemblage theory provided a new theoretical perspective to the IS field and a new alternative empirical setting to the organizational literature.

Consumers play an increasingly central role in born digital organisations, including driving new approaches to consumer interaction, communication, and marketing. However, we know little about how born digital organise internally to manage and respond to consumer demands. In this paper, we studied an organisation providing online travel services where its aim was to reorganise internally, in relation to consumers, through developing a set of ‘search’ practices. The role of search is particularly salient for born digitals, giving rise to new roles and expertise where organisations attempt to pre-empt user actions. Through qualitative research, we show how a born digital organisation creates new practices that we label pre-emptive, reactive, reflective and adaptive. Our main finding is that rapidly and constantly reconfiguring practices, what these new experts call ‘constructive disruption’, is essential for born digitals to manage relationships with consumers. Our paper contributes by providing a better understanding of practices within born digital organisations, and specifically the practices born digitals use to navigate unpredictable emerging changes and produce constant novelty for customers. We also contribute to the concept of search and provide examples of how it might be employed to better understand digital organising and digital transformation.

Small business revenues worldwide were drastically affected by lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, many small businesses introduced new functionality through the adoption of digital technologies. However, little is known about the nature of these digital technology innovations, including whether they differed across industry sectors. Through a modified case study approach, we examine digital technology responses to the pandemic by small businesses that were identified in Google News. We introduce a new framework designed to describe the nature of the responses. Most small businesses that were examined introduced digital responses by offering new e-commerce facilities and/or converting their existing services to ‘e-services’, with some important cross sector exceptions. Practical suggestions for small businesses are provided.

The diffusion of disinformation via social media has become a pressing societal concern for business leaders and policy makers. In recent years, online disinformation has been implicated as a source of field-level institutional change across a variety of societal contexts. To better understand how online disinformation changes institutional issue fields, we explore how digital materiality affords users opportunities to create and propagate disinformation. We introduce and define three social media material features: modular content, content flow, and manifold network structures. From these digital materiality elements, we articulate three disinformation affordances: crafting, amplifying, and partitioning. We rely on several vignettes – far-right political conspiracy group, QAnon, anti-vaccination (i.e., anti-Vaxxers), and flat Earth beliefs – to illustrate how social media users exploit digital materiality and enact disinformation affordances. Our theoretical development also contributes to our understanding of how online disinformation disrupts institutional issue fields. In particular, we highlight several potential changes to institutional issue fields regarding power centralization, subfield structures, and institutional infrastructure. We conclude by offering recommendations for future research and social media policy.

Information systems (IS) literature has predominantly studied IS project control with a focus on software development projects. However, by virtue of digital transformation, an increasing number of organizations are implementing cross-functional teams, combining software development with software operations tasks. The goal is to react quickly to the ever-changing market requirements.

The DevOps concept aims to effectively orchestrate development and operations activities and smoothly manage tensions within teams, resulting from the heterogeneous composition of skills, responsibilities, and working styles.

In contrast to the predominant project management view of control of prior research, which focuses on software development, this study investigates a different perspective: focusing on exerting control in DevOps teams and simultaneously navigating tensions between software development and operations. Utilizing an inductive theory-building approach, we first identify the four tensions discussed in prior literature—namely, goal conflict, method discomfort, decision rights, and time rhythm—and then empirically derive corresponding resolutions.

Integrating our findings, we present an empirically derived model that can serve as a DevOps control approach for navigating the tensions between development and operations teams. This model extends our theoretical knowledge about control in DevOps teams and serves to inform IT practitioners, helping them successfully implement and manage DevOps teams.

Healthcare systems across the globe are riding a wave of clinical health IT investment, centered on electronic health records (EHR) systems. Supported by governmental incentives, this build-out has positioned the healthcare system for a period of transformation as EHR functionality has become ingrained in the work routines of healthcare providers and other system participants. We report on a field study of healthcare participants in the United States to explore the influence of EHR use on the boundaries and practices of the field. Our grounded theory analysis reveals the interplay between the field practices of individual communities and the boundary spanning practices that unite them. Through the adoption of a practice perspective, we highlight the changes to both boundary spanning and field practices engendered by enterprise EHR use and propose the complementary mechanisms of reticulation and boundary molding by which those changes emerge. We conclude with a consideration of the positive and potentially negative consequences of EHR use for delivery of healthcare services.

This paper addresses the dilemma that organizations face when they introduce information technology (IT) to standardize and guide operations and improve performance, while also supporting staff mindfulness in using IT and questioning it, to safeguard against errors. People are warned to be mindful in using the information provided by IT, yet IT may contribute to their mindlessness. Organizational operations involve routine work, where work is distributed across roles, in space and time. To fully understand mindfulness or mindlessness with IT at work it is necessary to consider the routines in which they are embedded. We sought to investigate what factors might influence mindfulness or mindlessness with IT in the context of organizational routines. We carried out an in-depth study of clinicians using technology during medications routines in a UK hospital. The IT in this context aimed to guide and standardize clinical work to improve medication safety. The study uncovered several factors influencing mindfulness and mindlessness with IT: not only the IT design but also task design, individual experience and history of IT use, distribution of work, and the situation at hand. These are interacting influences on mindfulness and mindlessness with IT, each embodying a tension, as each may influence both mindfulness and mindlessness. The distribution of work and the dynamics of the routine over time mean that individuals in the routine may (mindlessly) entrust mindfulness in using IT to others, or to other moments in time. The study highlights the complexity of achieving mindfulness with IT in organizations, and a nuanced relation between mindfulness and IT in a routine work context.