In an era of revolutionary new developments in basic information technology, innovation in its employment among organizations is increasingly crucial to competitive survival and success. The Information Systems (IS) unit within the business is largely responsible for meeting this challenge. Yet, current theory explains little about IS innovation and its role in organizational innovation in general. We suggest some needed foundations. IS innovations are posited to be of three types: Type I innovations confined to the IS task; Type II innovations supporting administration of the business; and Type III innovations imbedded in the core technology of the business. Diffusion among organizations is conjectured to occur by means of a communication circuit in which each IS unit is linked to its professional and business environments. Systematic differences in adoption and evolution patterns among IS innovation types are expected. Three specific IS innovations---data administration, the information center, and material requirements planning (MRP)---illustrate.information systems, innovation types, innovation adoption and diffusion, innovation evolution

We offer a revised institutional view of how new technology for information systems (IS) comes to be applied and diffused among organizations. Previous research argues that early adoption of a technological innovation is based on local, rational organizational choice, while later adoption is institutionalized and taken for granted. We suggest that institutional processes are engaged from the beginning. Specifically, a diverse interorganizational community creates and employs an organizing vision of an IS innovation that is central to its early, as well as later, diffusion. This vision serves key functions in interpretation, legitimation, and the organization and mobilization of economic roles and exchanges. The development and influence of an organizing vision is determined by a variety of institutional forces. Among these forces, the community's discourse serves as the developmental engine. Other factors—business commerce, the IS practitioners' world view, the motivating business problematic, the core technology, and material processes of adoption and diffusion—provide the discourse with its content, structure, motivation, and direction. Primary development of the organizing vision takes place during the innovation's earliest diffusion. The hesitant early majority among the prospective adopters relies on this development in its efforts to make sense of the innovation. Where the organizing vision remains underdeveloped after early adoption, later diffusion and institutionalization of the innovation is likely to be retarded.

Failures in the implementation of management information systems ("MIS's") can be attributed in part to a lack of managerial "involvement" and "appreciation." The concepts of involvement and appreciation are defined, and their measurement in a real-world research setting is presented. The testing of several hypotheses in this setting indicates that managers who involve themselves with the MIS will appreciate the system, and that managers who are uninvolved will be unappreciative.

Maintenance and enhancement of application software consume a major portion of the total life cycle cost of a system. Rough estimates of the total systems and programming resources consumed range as high as 75-80 percent in each category. However, the area has been given little attention in the literature. To analyze the problems in this area a questionnaire was developed and pretested. It was then submitted to 120 organizations. Respondents totaled 69. Responses were analyzed with the SPSS statistical package. The results of the analysis indicate that: (1) maintenance and enhancement do consume much of the total resources of systems and programming groups; (2) maintenance and enhancement tend to be viewed by management as at least somewhat more important than new application software development; (3) in maintenance and enhancement, problems of a management orientation tend to be more significant than those of a technical orientation; and (4) user demands for enhancements and extension constitute the most important management problem area.