Immutable Technology and the Breakdown of Organizational Change. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the National Communication Association, Las Vegas, NV.
3. $5 $4M $4bn
Technology Costs
Salesforce.com
Starting cost per user; corporate
implementations can be millions
Knight Foundation
Amount invested for a new
newspaper commenting system
Kaiser Permanente
Created a new electronic health
records system for
9 million users
3
4. Goal orientation,
organizational
context, and
perceived usefulness
are key
AST
Individual
perceptions of what
can be done with a
technology drive use
TAM
Forces of GoodTechnological Adaptation
Social influence &
individual evaluations
of technology are
key to use
Diffusion
4
5. Change is
constrained by
cognitive, regulative,
and normative
structures
Institutional
Environmental pressures
and interactions with
other organizations
constrain action
Industry Systems
The Dark SideBarriers in the Ecosystem
Organizational
routines and inertia
restrict the ability to
adapt & evolve
Ecological
5
11. 11
Technology
“After I complete this Excel sheet… I have to go
into [the sales interface] and change [the
information] there. Then I have to notify two
different manager groups with two different
email formats. And all the information on the
sheet they could’ve gotten from the system. So I
need to update the [shared spreadsheet], then
go to [the sales interface] and update that. “
Beta Corp.
“There’s a real disconnect
between our content streams so
we have one CMS for stories that
go through our print process and
then we have blogs that are on a
separate platform. There's no
connection.”
Midwest News
Restricts the ability to adapt routines
12. 12
Technology
“Theoretically the new sales tool
should work, but how these
things work it is only as good as
the things people put in, and we
are humans and people are lazy“
Beta Corp.
“[when we purchased the
system], there were no good
content management systems
and they had to be self-built.
What you could actually do to
content on the web was
extremely primitive”
Midwest News
Hinders future adaptation
13. 13
Technology
“We are now in an environment
where workers are more distributed
and people are in different places
than they were before. We have
tools to support communication and
right now people are capable, but
not comfortable using the tools.”
Beta Corp.
“We’ve gone from totally self-
contained to having dotted lines
all over the place and right now,
for the most part, I’ve got dotted
lines to everything.”
Midwest News
Disrupts the organizational structure
14. 14
Immutable TechnologyBarriers to communication and change
When organizations
are in periods of
stability
When prior
technology required
significant capital
investment
Technological
standards have
changed significantly
In early work on Adaptive Structure Theory, DeSanctis and Poole pointed to industrial pressures as an important factor for future scholars to consider … to date relatively little research in communication has looked at the negative pressures of the organizational environment.
64% Of companies surveyed in 2013 planed “significant investment” in Big Data according to
Gartner Research
Institutionalism – fields.. Constrained by acceptable behavior (normative), cognitive structures… regulative structures Scott 1995, Dimaggion and Powell 1983 normative... Accepted technological standards
Industry systems lieblebici 1991 marginal/central actors
---Midwest Media: Data collection occurred in 2007 – 11 interviews & 1 week of observation data – 2 teams … 2 managers and 9 employees focused on print and digital journalism
Major newspaper publishing company. Initial investment in CMS made in 1998; had not overhauled system since then. Daily circulation – at the time – of their leading paper – was more than 350,000 readers --- work process requites multiple teams to engage with content.
Focus on content management system
Content management systems in the United States newspaper industry
Publsihing firms tuse CMS in three different ways: 2010 technological firms which use integrated tools based on Web technology, follower firms that focus on virtual work coordinating through CMS a, traditional firms just use CMS as a common hub for sharing content, and noninnovative firms have not yet utilized CMS
---Beta Corp: Data collection occurred in 2014 – 8 weeks of observation data… observed 4 teams and a total of 18 workers.
---interpretive case study analysis - - multiple cases further allows for a cross-case analysis, enhance the study and the reliability of the findings
top 10 technology consulting --- focused on the sales division --- 3,000 employees globally
email, landline phones, a number of proprietary collaborative technologies, including an enterprise social media site, an internal instant messaging application, an online corporate directory and an online knowledge repository
Focus on internal sales tracking tools
in this study experienced disruptions to work processes.
Make sure quotes all come from the same place
Roadblocks are likely to exist when (a) organizations have previously experienced periods of stability, (b) organizations invested heavily in technology during that period of stability, and (c) the organization has since entered into a marked period of technological disruption.
Because new technology is being introduced on top of – and not wholly in place of – embedded technologies – it has the opposite effect of adding work and slowing organizational change people are either a) now using the old and new technology, or b) do not want to use the new technology because the old technology is still in place.
(a) the development of organizational routines that prioritize existing technology, (b) a failure to accommodate or anticipate adaptive processes on the part of organizational members, and (c) over-embeddedness of existing technology into the organizational culture