Scalable growth in IT-enabled service provisioning: a sensemaking perspective

Abstract

Vendors of IT-enabled services must address equivocal and changing requirements from diverse customers while simultaneously making a profit. However, our knowledge of how these organizations can achieve the necessary scalability is limited. Against this backdrop, we leverage organizational sensemaking to investigate how a large vendor attempted to create a scalable service infrastructure through three sequential strategies. This in-depth case study reveals key factors that challenged the efficacy of each strategy. First, addressing equivocality through structural separation exacerbated the organization’s challenges because of misaligned collective identities between business units. Second, reducing equivocality through market segmentation proved to be inadequate because individual-level cognitive constraints shaped pre-packaged solutions that lacked functionality. Third, responding to equivocality through service modularization was challenged due to lack of social interaction about standardization of component interfaces, system and process redundancies, and inflexible process architectures. We offer a detailed analysis of these strategies and discuss implications in relation to theory and practice.

Keywords:

• IT-enabled services
• service management
• service innovation
• organizational sensemaking
• modular design
• case study

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mark O Lewis

About the authors

Mark Lewis is an Assistant Professor of Information and Process Management at Bentley University. His research focuses on issues of technology and innovation management, with a special emphasis on the strategic use of information technology, enterprise transformation, and investigating patterns of collective action within and between organizations. His research has either already appeared or is forthcoming in scholarly journals, such as MISQ-Executive, European Journal of Information Systems, Journal of Information Technology, and the Journal of Global Information Technology Management. Before entering academia, Mark worked with IBM Global Services as a business analyst and as a researcher with IBM's advanced internet technology division. He has worked on research projects sponsored by companies such as UPS, Daimler-Chrysler, Hewlett Packard, Gartner, and SAP. He can be reached at [email protected].

Lars Mathiassen

Lars Mathiassen is a member of IEEE, ACM, and AIS. He received his master's degree in computer science from Aarhus University, Denmark, in 1975; his Ph.D. in informatics from Oslo University, Norway, in 1981; and his Dr. Techn. degree in software engineering from Aalborg University, 1998. He is currently GRA Eminent Scholar and Professor in Department of Computer Information Systems and co-founder of Center for Process Innovation at Georgia State University. His research interests are within information systems and software engineering with a particular emphasis on process innovation. He has co-authored Computers in Context (Blackwell 1993), Object Oriented Analysis & Design (Marko Publishing, 2000), and Improving Software Organizations (Addison-Wesley, 2002). He has served as senior editor for MIS Quarterly and his research is published in journals like Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Communications of the ACM, Journal of AIS, Information Systems Journal, and European Journal of Information Systems. He can be reached at [email protected].

Arun Rai

Arun Rai is Regents' Professor and the Harkins Chair in the Center for Process Innovation and the Department of Computer Information Systems at the Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University. His research has examined how firms can leverage information technologies in their strategies, inter-firm relationships, and processes, and how systems can be successfully developed and implemented. His articles have appeared in Management Science, MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, and other journals. He serves, or has served, as a Senior Editor at Information Systems Research and Journal of Strategic Information Systems and as an Associate Editor at Journal of MIS, Management Science and MIS Quarterly. He was named Fellow of the Association for Information Systems in 2010 in recognition for outstanding contributions to the information systems discipline. He can be reached at [email protected].