Until recently, firms with competent enterprise information and technology governance created medium-term competitive advantages within their industry sectors. They did this through: using digital disruption; creating new business models; providing a superior customer experience; digitizing business operations; developing approaches to internal and external communications; the building of large and engaged online communities, and many other strategies with information and technology at the core. As capability grows, market leaders will use innovative digital strategies to both further develop and protect the value created, and develop the capability to transform their organizations rapidly. Digital leaders increase the urgency for all boards to govern information and technology as strategic assets. Increasingly, the existence of competency around GEIT within the board room will be needed to not only gain advantage, but to merely achieve parity with those who have recognized its essential nature as a new core competency. Those who remain in the denial of the need to build IT capability at all levels risk joining the growing list of once-leading firms left behind in the digital cloud of smoke that characterizes the current and emerging operating environment.

Organizations are increasingly adopting digital strategies and investing heavily in digital technologies and initiatives. However, to date, there does not appear to be a clear understanding of digital strategies and their purpose, which forms the motivation for this research. This research-in-progress study aims to address this research gap by exploring 1) the various conceptions of digital strategy, and 2) the way in which digital strategies differ from conventional strategies, through interviews with three senior executives. We employed thematic analysis to analyse the interview data, which resulted in the identification of ten themes that were grouped under three theoretical constructs. We then explored the applicability of the six dimensions of strategy proposed by Hax (1990) in the digital context and proposed two additional dimensions. The contribution of this study is to provide a deeper understanding of digital strategy to support further academic research and provide guidance to practitioners.

The concept of a platform is in widespread use across a range of disciplines. This research explores the development of the platform concept through a systematic review of the literature using algorithmic historiography. The paper generates a time-based visualisation of relationships between the most cited articles in the domain. Key structural findings are triangulated using thematic content analysis, quantitative citation and network graph analysis. The analysis delineates two conceptions of platform: interior and exterior. These two classifications provide a historical lens that demonstrate the development of the platform concept over time. Furthermore, the methodology provides a generalizable systematic approach to examining the historical development, underlying structures and significant contributions of a specific knowledge domain.

Purpose - This chapter discusses the constitution of Shared Services and the value of a consensual agreement of a definition for academe and practice. It explores the operating principles and services, the concepts of internal customer and internal service, and their importance for the practitioner and research communities.Methodology/approach - This chapter employed a broad review of the literature to examine Shared Services. The research team used NVivo as a tool to create a database of key articles and books to analyze the key concepts and topics.Findings - There is a lack of consensus on the definition of Shared Services in the research and practitioner community. Additionally, the concept of internal customer requires greater exploration and understanding within the context of Shared Services. How Shared Services provides competitive advantage to organizations is also not well understood.Research limitations/implications - This discussion provides a challenge to the research community to focus on the contributions of shared services to business management theory. This requires a consensus that is currently nonexistent, to ensure the correct use of the terminology and model.Practical implications - By establishing a clearer understanding of what is Shared Services, the academic and the practitioner community, in particular, will gain greater competencies on Shared Services to support change management programs during the implementation phases and minimize implementation costs by lowering organizational and people resistance. The variants in shared services terminology create confusion which is likely to result in ambiguity during implementation and have practical implications on governance, customers and service, benefits realization and performance.Originality/value of chapter - This chapter addresses the lack of agreed definition of the term Shared Services and the role of the internal customer and consequent internal service delivery.

Organizational transformations reliant on successful ICT system developments (continue to) fail to deliver projected benefits even when contemporary governance models are applied rigorously. Modifications to traditional program, project and systems development management methods have produced little material improvement to successful transformation as they are unable to routinely address the complexity and uncertainty of dynamic alignment of IS investments and innovation. Complexity theory provides insight into why this phenomenon occurs and is used to develop a conceptualization of complexity in IS-driven organizational transformations. This research-in-progress aims to identify complexity formulations relevant to organizational transformation. Political/power based influences, interrelated business rules, socio-technical innovation, impacts on stakeholders and emergent behaviors are commonly considered as characterizing complexity while the proposed conceptualization accommodates these as connectivity, irreducibility, entropy and/or information gain in hierarchically approximation and scaling, number of states in a finite automata and/or dimension of attractor, and information and/or variety.

Effective information and knowledge management (IKM) is critical to corporate success; yet, its actual establishment and management is not yet fully understood. We identify ten organizational elements that need to be addressed to ensure the effective implementation and maintenance of information and knowledge management within organizations. We define these elements and provide key characterizations. We then discuss a case study that describes the implementation of an information system (designed to support IKM) in a medical supplies organization. We apply the framework of organizational elements in our analysis to uncover the enablers and barriers in this systems implementation project. Our analysis suggests that taking the ten organizational elements into consideration when implementing information systems will assist practitioners in managing information and knowledge processes more effectively and efficiently. We discuss implications for future research.

This paper explores the philosophical origins of appropriation of Information Systems (IS) using Marxian and other socio-cultural theory. It provides an in-depth examination of appropriation and its application in extant IS theory. We develop a three-tier model using Marx’s foundational concepts and from this generate four propositions that we test in an empirical example of IS in anesthesia. Using Marxian theory, this paper seeks common ground among existing theories of technology appropriation in IS research. This work contributes to IS research by (1) opening philosophical discussions on appropriation and the human ↔ technology nexus, (2) drawing on these varying perspectives to propose a general conceptualization of technology appropriation and (3) providing a starting point towards a general causal model of technology appropriation.

This paper presents an exploratory study of the appropriation of information systems (AIS) in anaesthesia. Using a grounded theory approach, we identify three key concepts and the basic social process of appropriation to construct a theoretical model that explains why certain systems are chosen, what technologies are considered and how they are appropriated. This study attempts to offer theoretical contributions to the field of anaesthesia and represents the first grounded theory investigation with an IS perspective conducted in this area.

This article defines online communities and their constituent elements. It provides a framework in which online communities can be discussed and compared irrespective of topic or content. It explores the notions of core and peripheral membership and behaviour and provides a set of metrics for determining the activity profile of the community. Finally it presents a case study of an online community and discusses it using the framework and metrics presented.

Services and service quality have become increasingly important competitive differentiators for firms, as well as contributors to national economies. Due to the relative uniqueness of each service, there is little consensus on the dimensions for service quality evaluation. The best known and most widely used of several instruments for measuring service quality is SERVQUAL (1988). Yet, tests of SERVQUAL's reliability and validity have been mixed. This paper presents results from cross-referencing seven service quality measurement models from seven different industries, with SERVQUAL. Results indicate that only the 'assurance' and 'empathy' dimensions are represented across all seven industries, while other attributes in the various industry-instruments either map partially or did not map onto SERVQUAL's (1988) five dimensions. From the mappings, several important gaps in the industry instruments are identified. These results suggest potential from a harmonized set of global service quality dimensions.

Brisbane Airport Corporation (BAC) has recently been recognised as the world’s most efficient and customer focused privatised airport. Studying the corporate strategies and knowledge management issues faced by a company as successful as BAC holds important insights. This paper discusses four key characteristics which impact on BAC’s knowledge management strategy: First, corporate values are embedded in a strong culture that is built upon ‘win/win’ outcomes, operational flexibility, and consultative management. These values drive BAC’s strategy of maintaining a slim core, outsourcing, relationships building, and committing to shared risks and returns. BAC faces challenges of growth, exercise of influence on more with fewer, migration from control to culture, and migration from a value chain driven airport to a self-sustaining economic city. Second, BAC is exploratory by nature. An explorer meets new challenges afresh, is innovative, fluid, and populated by experienced and expert people who generate a constant flow of new ideas. Third, there is an increasing need to systematically capture and transfer competences across more people in the slim core. Fourth, BAC favours a personalisation strategy which is based in dialogue and the exchange of knowledge principally via people. It uses technology more as a communication device than a repository.

This paper explores a process view of call-centres and the knowledge infrastructures that support these processes. As call-centres grow and become more complex in their function and organisation so do the knowledge infrastructures required to support their size and complexity. This study suggests a knowledge-based hierarchy of 'advice-type' call-centres and discusses associated knowledge management strategies for different sized centres. It introduces a Knowledge Infrastructure Hierarchy model, with which it is possible to analyze and classify call-centre knowledge infrastructures. The model also demonstrates different types of interventions supporting knowledge management in call-centres. Finally the paper discusses the possibilities of applying traditional maturity model approaches in this context.

This paper reports in-progress research on factors driving software and maintenance sourcing decisions. It proposes that software and maintenance sourcing decisions are interrelated, and that these decisions, while driven primarily by economic,factors posited by Transaction Cost Theory, are moderated by psychological and sociological factors such as those identified in technology adoption and diffusion theories. The model development will be informed by case studies, and the constructs and causality tested by survey. The validated model will serve as the theoretical foundation for development of an analytical model and associated decision-support tool for aiding sourcing decisions as well as simulation models for understanding emergent behaviours among software and maintenance service providers and clients.

Recognizing that knowledge processes are social processes, and assuming that the theories considered within are commensurable, this paper proposes Giddens’ structuration theory as a basis for comparing knowledge management theories to identify common themes within the discipline. The discovery of common themes is a step toward the identification of any dominant orthodoxy within the knowledge management discipline. Representative, contemporary knowledge management theories are identified from the literature and compared against the principal themes of structuration theory. Preliminary findings suggest much commonality across the theories evaluated and promise from a lower level of analysis.

When a business introduces the use of e-commerce applications the software related business risks the business faces change. A corresponding change may also occur in the risks faced by the developers of the e-commerce applications. Unrecognised changes in the risks involved in software projects have considerable implications for a business. This paper reports the outcomes of the preliminary phase of a study into the implications of e-commerce for software project risk in financial institutions. Firstly, the analysis draws on the e-commerce and systems development literatures to determine the differences between e-commerce development projects and traditional development projects. Four key areas of difference were found between traditional projects and e-commerce including changes in the development process outcomes, changes in the development processes and methods, changes in stakeholder groups and changes in determining application requirements. Secondly, the differences are analysed against a set of software project risk factors from a recent reputable study. Each of the risk factors was affected in some way. Some of these impacts appear to be temporary, while others appear highly dependent upon the individual circumstances of the organization undertaking the project. Some risks did, however, appear to be permanently increased or decreased, thus signalling a fundamental difference in the overall risk profile of e-commerce projects when compared to traditional projects. Whether the impacts are temporary, contextual or permanent, they all have implications for way in which risk in e-commerce software projects is assessed and managed.

This qualitative study of support personnel in an Enterprise Systems Application Service Provider assesses and confirms Markus’ Theory of Knowledge Reuse. Following disappointing knowledge capture outcomes during implementation and the consequential inability to reuse that knowledge effectively, enterprise systems applications support managers are recognizing the importance of lifecycle knowledge management as they face the first major upgrade of their clients’ enterprise systems. This study also explores the dominant knowledge reuse types of support personnel. We extend Markus’ typology to include Primary Data Miner to explain management’s dominant knowledge reuse situations.

This paper reports preliminary results from a three-round, non-anonymous Delphi-type survey of 23 government agencies within the Queensland State Government (QSG). The survey examined issues associated with the introduction of the SAP R/3 within that government. Our analysis employs a holistic, interpretive and inductive approach towards understanding the issues underlying the implementation of an enterprise system such as the SAP R/3. Factor analysis of “weights” given by respondents in the final round of the survey on the relative importance of the implementation issues reveals the emergence of seven factors that could undermine the successful implementation of an enterprise system.