The paper extends the concept of “user” to account for a new, more formalized role that some client organizations play in the diffusion of packaged enterprise systems. Package vendors are attempting to draw parts of their user base into activities related to the promotion, selling, and commodification of systems. Users, in turn, appear willing to help construct these systems as objects of consumption for others. This can appear to be rather idiosyncratic behavior. Information Systems scholars have argued that relations between packaged enterprise system vendors and users are attenuated. Why might the user help the vendor market its systems in this way? What benefits accrue from it? And what role are users performing in carrying out this work? To show how this is becoming a general facet of the work of some packaged enterprise system users, we develop the notion of “reference actor,” which is an extension of the earlier Information Systems concept of “social actor.” In combining insights from the social shaping of technology and the biography of artifacts, and drawing on long-term qualitative fieldwork, we analyze this new actor role in relation to expectations and commitments coming from the wider packaged enterprise system community. In return for the help provided to prospective adopters, reference actors are also able to gather various kinds of benefits for themselves and others. In particular, they build closer relations with vendors such that they can influence product development strategies.
The single site implementation study is an invaluable tool for studying the large-scale enterprise solution. Together with constructivist frameworks and ethnographic approaches it has allowed the development of rich local pictures of the immediate and adaptive response by user organizations to the take-up of what are, today, often generic packaged systems. However, to view the packaged enterprise solution principally at the place where the user encounters it also has limitations. It produces somewhat partial understandings of these complex artifacts. In particular, it downplays important influences from other sites and time frames. This paper argues that if we are to understand the full implications of enterprise solutions for organizations then we should study their "biography." This idea points to how the career of workplace technology is often played out over multiple time frames and settings. To understand its shaping therefore requires scholars to go beyond the study of technology at a single locale or moment and, rather, attempt to follow it through space and time. The paper develops two ideas to aid this kind of study. We discuss better spatial metaphors that might help us explore the hybrid and extended spaces in which packaged software systems develop and evolve. We also review improved temporal understandings that may capture the multiple contemporary and historical time frames at play. The paper concludes by discussing some possible research directions that a focus on the biography of a technology might allow.