ABSTRACT
Organizations are increasingly focusing on the design of organizational information systems that incorporate both business process and information technology (IT) change, to achieve alignment between business and IT objectives. These information systems (IS) span functional boundaries and business units, requiring many different disciplinary, organizational, and political interests to be negotiated and multiple, diverse ways of working to be reconciled. Organizational IS design, especially when this spans functional or business unit boundaries, conceptualizes and implements changes to the organization and practices of work, as well as technological change. IS managers thus need to balance the need for actionable, objective definitions of IT-related change with a need for radical, boundary-spanning inquiry into what needs to change (Engeström, Engeström, and Kärkkäinen 1995; Liu, Sun, and Bennett 2002). In the organizational and MIS literature, we have an increasing awareness of the emergent nature of IT-systems definition and its embeddedness within wider processes of organizational problem solving and business-process change. The term information system is used here to mean an integrated social system of organizational actors, using information to perform purposeful activity, who may or may not use computer-based technology to facilitate their work and to provide information (Silva and Hirschheim 2007). Following the use of the term in other fields, such as architecture, product design, or graphic design, the term design is viewed here as the complete process of conceptualizing, developing, refining, and evaluating an artifact-related solution to a problem, rather than as a single stage of the IT systems development life cycle (Lawson, 2000). Increasingly, the critical processes of boundary-spanning design take place “upstream” of the development life cycle waterfall model. Organizational change and problem-solving projects drive business process change and provide “early requirements” for IT systems development. This form of design involves emergent knowledge processes, for which goals emerge during the process of design (Markus et al., 2002). As I will argue below, it involves a dialectic between the processes of inquiry and processes of closure, whereas the typical IS design method focuses exclusively on closure.
