The Organizing Vision in Information Systems Innovation

Abstract

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.

Hype or Reality: Will Enterprise Systems as a Service Become an Organizing Vision for Enterprise Cloud Computing in Denmark?

“…The organizing vision is important for early and later adoption and diffusion. The vision supports interpretation (to make sense of the innovation), legitimation (to establish the underlying rationale) and mobilization (to activate, motivate and structure the material realization of innovation) [23,25].…”

“…Swanson and Ramiller (1997) takes institutional theory into IS research and propose the concept of organizing vision in IS innovation, which they define as "a focal community idea for the application of information technology in organizations" [23]. Earlier research has argued that early adoption of a technological innovation is based on rational choice while later adoption is institutionalized.…”

The Service Behind the Service: Sensegiving in the Service Economy

“…Figure 1 includes yet another layer in which sensemaking and sensegiving matter to the IT design and service delivery, and this is wider public discourse on IT-enabled services. This is where the organizing vision for the IT-enabled service arises, as Swanson and Ramiller (1997) would label it. The public discourse is not idle chatter, nor simply a playground for pundits and journalists, but rather helps to define how people and their organizations think substantively about the possibilities, while also lending normative force to the service innovation Ramiller 1997, 2004).…”

Information Systems Innovation Research and the Case of RFID

“…Depth of impact is a more intangible concept. It encompasses the degree to which the application reaches into and changes existing processes and organizational routines (Gallivan 2001;Swanson and Ramiller 1997). Complete assimilation has occurred when routinization (Tornatsky and Fleischer 1990), or confirmation (Rogers' Stage 5) or infusion (Cooper and Zmud's Stage 6) is reached.…”

“…IS researchers, such as Swanson and Ramiller (1997) and Attewell (1992), who have worked on the subject of the diffusion of IS applications have all argued that many IS applications diverge from the characteristics assumed of innovations for traditional theories like Rogers'. For Cell 4 ICT applications and RFID in particular, these assumptions do not hold.…”