In striving to learn about an information technology innovation, organizations draw on knowledge resources available in the community of diverse interests that convenes around that innovation. But even as such organizations learn about the innovation, so too does the larger community. Community learning takes place as its members reflect upon their learning and contribute their experiences, observations, and insights to the community's on-going discourse on the innovation. Community learning and organizational learning thus build upon one another in a reciprocal cycle over time, as the stock of interpretations, adoption rationales, implementation strategies, and utilization patterns is expanded and refined. We advance an overall model of this learning cycle, drawing on two community-level theories (management fashion and organizing vision), both of which complement the dominant emphases of the literature on IT innovation and learning. Relative to this cycle, we then empirically examine, in particular, the dependence of community learning on organizational learning. Sampling the public discourse on enterprise resource planning (ERP) over a 14-year period, we explore how different kinds of organizational actors can play different roles, at different times, in contributing different types of knowledge to an innovation's public discourse. The evidence suggests that research analysts and technology vendors took leadership early on in articulating the "know-what" (interpretation) and "know-why" (rationales) for ERP, while later on adopters came to dominate the discourse as its focus shifted to the "know-how" (strategies and capabilities). We conclude by identifying opportunities for further inquiry on and strategic management of community learning and its interactions with organizational learning.
Although organizational innovation with information technology is often carefully considered, bandwagon phenomena indicate that much innovative behavior may nevertheless be of the "me too" variety. In this essay, we explore such differences in innovative behavior. Adopting a perspective that is both institutional and cognitive, we introduce the notion of mindful innovation with IT. A mindful firm attends to an IT innovation with reasoning grounded in its own organizational facts and specifics. We contrast this with mindless innovation, where a firm's actions betray an absence of such attention and grounding. We develop these concepts by drawing on the recent appearance of the idea of mindfulness in the organizational literature, and adapting it for application to IT innovation. We then bring mindfulness and mindlessness together in a larger theoretical synthesis in which these apparent opposites are seen to interact in ways that help to shape the overall landscape of opportunity for organizational innovation with IT. We conclude by suggesting several promising new research directions.
Making sense of new information technology (IT) and the many buzzwords associated with it is by no means an easy task for executives. Yet doing so is crucial to making good innovation decisions. This paper examines how information systems (IS) executives respond to what has been termed organizing visions for IT, grand ideas for applying IT, the presence of which is typically announced by much "buzz" and hyperbole. Developed and promulgated in the wider interorganizational community, organizing visions play a central role in driving the innovation adoption and diffusion process. Familiar and recent examples include electronic commerce, data warehousing, and enterprise systems. A key aspect of an organizing vision is that it has a career. That is, even as it helps shape how IS managers think about the future of application and practice in their field, the organizing vision undertakes its own struggle to achieve ascendancy in the community. The present research explores this struggle, specifically probing how IS executives respond to visions that are in different career stages. Employing field interviews and a survey, the study identifies four dimensions of executive response focusing on a vision's interpretability, plausibility, importance, and discontinuity. Taking a comparative approach, the study offers several grounded conjectures concerning the career dynamics of organizing visions. For the IS executive, the findings help point the way to a more proactive, systematic, and critical stance toward innovations that can place the executive in a better position to make informed adoption decisions.
The flow of manuscripts through the editorial offices of an academic journal can provide valuable information both about the performance of the journal as an instrument of its field and about the structure and evolution of the field itself. We undertook an analysis of the manuscripts submitted to the journal Information Systems Research (JSR) during its start-up years, 1987 through 1992, in an effort to provide a foundation for examining the performance of the journal, and to open a window on to the information systems (IS) field during that period. We identified the primary research question for each of 397 submissions to ISR, and then categorized the research questions using an iterative classification procedure. Ambiguities in classification were exploited to identify relationships among the categories, and some overarching themes were exposed in order to reveal levels of structure in the journal's submissions stream. We also examined the distribution of submissions across categories and over the years of the study period, and compared the structures of the submissions stream and the publication stream. We present the results with the goal of broadening the perspectives which individual members of the IS research community have of JSR and to help fuel community discourse about the nature and proper direction of the field. We provide some guidelines to assist readers in this interpretive task, and offer some observations and speculations to help launch the discussion.