Embedding Large-Scale Information Technology into the Organization's Work Systems
AUTHORS
Joachim Jean-Jules,Canadian Institute for Entrepreneurship and Management, Quebec, Canada
ABSTRACT
It has long been recognized that to reap intended benefits from their Information Systems (IS), organizations have to embed them, i.e. fully incorporate them into their projects and work systems. This has resulted in a considerable body of research on the topic. Despite this long-standing interest in studying the embeddedness of information systems, our understanding of how it develops and materializes in an organizational context is still limited. IS embeddedness unfolds over some time and involves not only the organization's work systems but also the individual users and behavioral team processes. However, IS/IT scholars have examined the phenomenon almost exclusively at the organizational level. This has resulted in an incomplete theoretical understanding of the phenomenon and a limited capacity of managers to devise interventions to secure IS embeddedness. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to offer a multilevel framework of IS embeddedness that contributes to advancing IS/IT embeddedness research while providing managers with useful insights about the kind of managerial interventions most suitable to secure IS embeddedness depending on whether the work environment or the organizational system is considered to be the primary embedding context. To do so, the study draws from extant research on micro-foundations, work-team literature in organizational psychology, and multilevel theory development to shed light on the mechanisms of embeddedness and its underlying processes; and how such mechanisms can be fostered and strengthened through examining the way individual, group and organizational characteristics interact and combine to give rise to the embeddedness of IS. In doing so, the study provides a better understanding of both the micro and macro-aspects of IS embeddedness including its emergence process on the one hand and managers' expanded capacity to secure the embeddedness of IS implemented under their auspices on the other hand.
KEYWORDS
Technology embeddedness, Enterprise information systems, Multilevel theory, Sensemaking, Legitimacy judgment, Managerial interventions
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