1.
Duncan Chapple
WHAT DO TECHNOLOGIES
DO IN ORGANISATIONS?
October 14 What do technologies do? @DuncanChapple 1

2.
Comparison of three views
Shared critical view of the managerial view
Advocates of starting from ‘as is’, rather than ‘to be’
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
October 14 What do technologies do? @DuncanChapple 2

3.
Claudio Ciborra reviews the managerial literature
“THE CONTROL APPROACH
DOES NOT ALWAYS WORK”
October 14 What do technologies do? @DuncanChapple 3

4.
‘Managerial’ viewpoint
Unoriginal 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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5.
Two ‘managerial’ styles
Normative approaches
IT “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 deals
Accounts 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
October 14 What do technologies do? @DuncanChapple 5

6.
Problems identified in cases
We regard the geometrical models as a superstructure world,
as outcomes of an idealisation process
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
October 14 What do technologies do? @DuncanChapple 6

7.
What is observed in the cases,
but absent in managerialism?
Caring actors
Hospitality:
coping with
ambiguity
Liquid
portfolio?
Asset
synergy!
Cultivation:
tensions +
resources 
innovation
‘Agendas’
versus the
infrastructure
Strategy
emerges from
implementation
Align the human
and non-human
components
Make the
double loop
real
October 14 What do technologies do? @DuncanChapple 7

8.
Bottom line:-
“THE CONTROL APPROACH
WORKS ONLY WHEN DENIED”
October 14 What do technologies do? @DuncanChapple 8

9.
Andy Crabtree et al
“BPR IS INADEQUATE FOR
THE PURPOSE”
October 14 What do technologies do? @DuncanChapple 9

10.
BPR & Quickmaps
Business 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
October 14 What do technologies do? @DuncanChapple 10

11.
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
October 14 What do technologies do? @DuncanChapple 11

12.
Bottom line:-
“ETHNOGRAPHY MAY BE
COMPLIMENTARY TO BPR”
October 14 What do technologies do? @DuncanChapple 12

13.
Jannis Kallinicos
“ERP IS A TECHNOLOGY OF
REGULATION NOT INNOVATION”
October 14 What do technologies do? @DuncanChapple 13

14.
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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15.
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
October 14 What do technologies do? @DuncanChapple 15

16.
Bottom line:-
“ERP PRIVILEGES PROCEDURE
OVER LOCAL KNOWLEDGE”
October 14 What do technologies do? @DuncanChapple 16

17.
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.
October 14 What do technologies do? @DuncanChapple 17

18.
Discussion
Follow-up points to @DuncanChapple