Managers want IT to help run the organisation, and that's why approaches like BPR and ERP are so popular. However, some of the most widely used academic research shows that IT doesn't work that way in practice. Half the time it's an arena for horsetrading, and the other half of the time managers are hitting themselves against a brick wall. In this presentation, Duncan Chapple summarises that research.

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
October 14 What do technologies do? @DuncanChapple 4

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
October 14 What do technologies do? @DuncanChapple 14

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