Stakeholders, contradictions and salience: An empirical study of a Norwegian G2G effort

Author's version of a chapter in Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. Also available from the publisher at http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.2006.436 Previous studies indicate that the expected effects of e-Government are slower to realize than initially expected. Several authors argue that e-Government involves particularly complex settings, consisting of a variety of stakeholders promoting different and often conflicting objectives. Yet, few studies have explicitly addressed the inherent challenges of this complexity. This study focuses on the extent to which contradictory stakeholder objectives can help explain the relatively slow progress of …

Learning processes in user training

While the maturing research literature on training has generated increasingly sophisticated and more comprehensive theoretical models, the actual process through which users learn to use a system remains a relatively neglected area. The extant literature that has paid attention to processes have conceptualized these as structures and examined them through variance studies. In this paper, we address this knowledge gap by advancing hermeneutics as a lens to depict the process through which users come to learn about the system. We explain the hermeneutic process, situate it in a training context and illustrate our conceptualization by interpreting a specific training program at a large organiz…

Understanding Contradictions in Enterprise System Implementations: A Case for Stakeholder Theory

Enterprise Systems (ES) implementation is challenging, and handling conflicting interests may be vital for success. Previous research has established how ES implementation involves dialectics, often related to multiple stakeholders. Involved stakeholders have in previous studies been analyzed in a power perspective, through the lens of organizational influence processes. Stakeholder theory (ST) takes a wider perspective, by including legitimacy and urgency in addition to power. An interesting perspective is therefore a suggested combination of ST and dialectics. This paper presents an ES implementation case where the explicit combination of ST and dialectics was tried out in the data analys…

Analyzing Stakeholder Diversity in G2G Efforts: Combining Descriptive Stakeholder Theory and Dialectic Process Theory

Author's version of an article published in e-Service Journal, 6 (2), 3-23. Previous research indicates that the benefits of e-government initiatives are slower to realize than initially expected. This has partly been ascribed to the particularly complex settings of e-government projects, consisting of a variety of stakeholders promoting different and often conflicting objectives. Yet few studies have explicitly addressed the inherent challenges of this diversity. This study presents an analytical approach for investigating contradictory stakeholder interests by combining descriptive stakeholder theory and dialectic process theory. Descriptive stakeholder theory is concerned with why some s…

Session details: Project outcomes

Corporate User Representatives and the Dialectics of Enterprise Systems: A Quest for Social Actors with Political Skill

Enterprise system implementations may be viewed as dialectics of adaptation. To reach a synthesis, a corporate user representative role is important. This paper addresses the question of who would be suitable for the role as a corporate user representative, i.e. what is required to fill the role. Drawing on an in-depth interpretive study from the oil industry, this paper contributes by augmenting our view of the corporate user representative as a multidimensional social actor. The case is from an innovative integration of ECM with collaboration technology. With a state-of-the-art combination of technologies, the task of representing 26.000 users proved to be a challenge. Based on longitudin…

Toward Understanding Contradictions in Enterprise System Implementations: Insights from a Case Study

This chapter presents findings from a study of the implementation of an enterprise system in an organization. The implementation process is viewed from a dialectic perspective, which means thinking in terms of contradictions. This chapter raises the following research question: how can we understand contradictions in enterprise system (ES) implementations? To answer this question, an interpretive research approach was chosen. The empirical part is a longitudinal case study. The system was in this case an innovative combination of collaboration and information management technologies. The main contradiction studied in this case was between an as-is implementation of standard software and an …

COURSE INTEGRATION: DESIGN FOR BETTER LEARNING?

Research-in-progress

In this paper, we present a research-in-progress study where we are revisiting a well known knowledge-level framework of understanding (i.e. knowledge) of a system proposed by Olfman et al. (2006). The catalyst for this relook was the anomalies and incongruencies that surfaced when we tried to apply this framework in another study whose aim was to examine how hermeneutic reflection helps in learning. While the framework proved a useful vehicle to carry out hermeneutic analysis, it also proved inadequate in accounting for some significant aspects of what constitutes understanding of a system. A closer look at the data revealed that other theoretical premises could not only provide a better i…