Combining social shaping of technology and communicative action theory for understanding rhetorical closure in IT

Technological appropriations as workarounds

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to further adaptive structuration theory (AST) by associating technological appropriations with health information technology workarounds. The author argues that appropriating electronic health record (EHR) technology ironically – in a way other than it is designed to be used – and divergently across an organization results in enhanced perceptions of EHR technology and its implementation.

Design/methodology/approach

Data were collected from 345 healthcare employees in a single healthcare organization that was switching to EHRs from paper records. Two major constructs of AST – unfaithfulness and dissension in appropriation – were operationalized and analyzed using multivariate regressions to test the relationship between the type of appropriation and perceptions of EHR technology’s relative advantage and implementation success.

Findings

Results reveal that both ironic (unfaithful) technological appropriation and dissension in technological appropriation across the organization predicted employees’ perceptions of EHR’s relative advantage and perceptions of EHR implementation success. Furthermore, physicians are the least likely to perceive EHR’s relative advantage or EHR implementation success. These results exemplify that EHR workarounds are taking place and reaffirm AST’s principle that employees evolve technology to better suit their working environments and preferences.

Originality/value

The survey and scales used in this study further demonstrate that there are meaningful statistical measures to accompany the qualitative methods frequently used in the AST literature. In addition, this paper expands AST research by exploring the positive outcomes that follow ironic and divergent technology appropriations.

Managing Erp System Risk in SMEs: A Multiple Case Study

ERP systems are increasingly accessible to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). If the potential benefits of these systems are significant, the same applies to the risk associated with their implementation. A number of authors emphasize that IS risk management is most effective when it is initiated at the earliest possible moment in the system's lifecycle, that is, at the adoption phase. But how do SMEs actually manage the risk of ERP implementation during the ERP adoption process? The research objectives are (1) to identify and describe the influence of the SMEs’ context on their implementation risk exposure, and (2) to understand whether and how, within the adoption process, SMEs actually manage the risk of implementing an ERP system supplied by an ERP vendor, with open source software, or through in-house development. In order to do so, four case studies of SMEs having implemented an ERP system were undertaken. The study shows that to manage risk at the adoption stage, SMEs can proceed in a rather intuitive, informal and unstructured manner, that is explicitly based however upon an architecture of basic principles, policies and practices.