ABSTRACT

Many careers in academia and in consultancy have been built speculating about the revolutionary impact of IT on organisations. Among commentators on and practitioners in the sphere of technological change there is, however, a growing awareness of the limitations of hyperbole. Prophecy is not enough. Clearly IT is implicated in some highly significant trends but to understand these requires a sophisticated account of technological development, organisational change and, crucially, the relationship between the two. This book’s starting premise is that there is still much work to be done on technology when it enters an organisation: the acquisition of new IT is only the start of a process during which both the technology and the organisation change.