Trans-situated use of integrated information systems

Abstract

Practice-based perspectives have established the situated nature of how technology is appropriated, enacted, and improvised in organisations. Empirical studies demonstrate how the same technology produces different results in different contexts of use. However, practice-based research has, to date, less to offer in terms of accounting for the relationship between instances of situated use (i.e., work practices) that are separated in space and/or time. The term trans-situated use is intended to highlight this blind spot. We focus on one type of relationship, viz., significant degrees of similarities between technologically mediated, geographically dispersed work practices. This degree of similarity is achieved through a process of commensurability consisting of (i) standardisation (addressing interdependencies between multiple instances of the ‘same’ work practice at geographically dispersed sites); and (ii) heterogeneity (addressing the entanglement of one work practice with apparently unrelated work practices and modules). Empirically, we report on a longitudinal, interpretative case study (1998–2004) of a company strategically targeting an integrated information system as a principal vehicle to establish similar services globally.

Keywords:

• practice-based research
• organisational change
• information technology
• standardisation of work practices

Acknowledgements

This paper is the result of a long and winding journey. We are indebted to a number of people who have made helpful comments to earlier versions of the paper: Kristin Braa, Samer Faraj, Ole Hanseth, Ola Henfridsson, Jannis Kallinikos, Dorothy Leidner, Neil Pollock, Susan Scott, Lucy Suchman, Geoff Walsham, Margunn Aanestad. We are also grateful for the highly constructive feedback from the editors and anonymous reviewers of the EJIS.

Notes

1 The notion of ‘trans-situated’ has been used in feminist studies in connection with the flexibility of identity. We, however, owe our use of the notion to Vaast & Walsham (2009), who employ it in a manner similar to ours to denote degrees of commonalities across different communities of practices.

2 The real names of the company and its information systems, projects, departments, and employees have been changed.

3 The International Association of Classification Societies and the International Maritime Organization (IMO) are the most important regulating agencies. IMO is a specialised agency of the United Nations that is responsible for improving maritime safety and preventing pollution from ships (http://www.imo.org).

4 The legacy system in question was an old database running on an IBM mainframe computer from the early 1970s. The system was used by a small group of engineers at headquarters to maintain information concerning audits, ships, and ship owners.

5 A service pack is a collection of updates, patches, and enhancements to the Windows operating system.

6 DLL stands for Dynamically Linked Library, which is a piece of software that is added dynamically to a larger system during runtime.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eric Monteiro

About the authors

Eric Monteiro is a Professor of Information Systems at the Department of Computer and Information Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Oslo. His work is on Information Infrastructures and he has published in MISQ, Information and Organization, CSCW Journal, and The Information Society and Scandinavian Journal of IS.

Knut H Rolland

Knut H. Rolland is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Norwegian School of Information Technology (NITH). He also works as a Consultant. Rolland's work has been published in The Information Society, Ethics and computer science and at ECIS, CSCW conferences.