PhD Graduates

IT services are increasingly being offered via a shared service model. This model promises the benefits of centralization and consolidation, as well as an increased customer satisfaction. Adopting shared services is not easy as it necessitates a major organizational change, with few documented exemplars to guide managers. This research explores a public IT unit’s realization of shared services with the intent to improve the transparency of its value proposition to their stakeholders. An ethnographic field study enabled in-situ data collection over a 24-month period. We analyzed the resulting, rich process data using the Punctuated Socio-Technical IS Change (PSIC) model. This resulted in several contributions: an explanatory account of shared services realization, an empirically grounded punctuated process model with seventeen critical incidents, and twelve key lessons for practitioners. Several extensions to extant process research methods are developed. These contributions combine to form a detailed and nuanced understanding of the process of realizing IT shared services at a large public university over a multi-year period.

This research takes steps towards developing a new theory of organizational information management based on the ideas that, first, information creates ordering effects in transactions and, second, that there are multiple centers of authority in organizations. The rationale for developing this theory is the empirical observation that hospitals have great difficulty in managing information relating to transactions with patients. The research illustrates the detailed workings of an initial conceptual framework based on an action research project into the revenue cycle of a hospital. The framework facilitates a deeper understanding of how information technology can help to transform information management practices in complex organizations, such as hospitals. At the same time, this research adds to the literature on Polycentricity Theory by linking its two core concepts—multiple nested centers of decision making and context-dependent governance—with Transaction Cost Theory and information management theories to establish a new foundation for understanding the role of information technology in organizational contexts.

The literature emphasizes the important role played by stakeholder perceptions in explaining success and failure of IT-enabled change efforts. However, our knowledge of how stakeholder perceptions evolve and interact with outcomes during change processes is still limited. Consequently, this study adapts technological frames of reference (TFR) to explore the dynamics of stakeholder perceptions based on action research into an IT-enabled sales process innovation project at VoiceTech. The study attempts to answer the following research questions: How can TFR be adapted and applied to support action research into IT-enabled change efforts? What was the role of stakeholder perceptions during IT-enabled sales process innovation at VoiceTech? How do stakeholder perceptions evolve and interact with outcomes during IT-enabled change efforts? The study develops TFR as a theory for investigating stakeholder perceptions during IT-enabled change and it offers a process model of how frame interactions, incongruencies, and inconsistencies contribute to frame shifts and change outcomes over time. In addition, the study provides detailed insights into how the IT-enabled sales process innovation at VoiceTech shaped and was shaped by shifts in stakeholder perceptions over time.

The outsourcing literature has offered a plethora of perspectives and models for understanding decision determinants and outcomes of outsourcing of business processes. While past studies have contributed significantly to scholarly research in this area, there are an insufficient number of studies that are provider centric. Consequently, there is a need to understand how service providers address a core challenge: to achieve scalable growth by developing standardized offerings that can be sufficiently customized to meet the unique demands of individual customers. This study explores how patterns of collective action within and between a provider and two of their largest customers relate to the tension between standardization and customization of information technology (IT)-enabled service provisioning. Specifically, it investigates the relationship between such behavioral patterns and the development of an enterprise architecture designed to address the tension between standardization and customization. A socio-cognitive sensemaking framework consisting of six core properties provides the analytical lens through which the relationship is investigated. The study adopts an interpretive case study methodology guided by the assumption that distinct dimensions of the social world exist, but understanding them comes from inter-subjective interaction between researcher and subject. The approach adopts a combination of literal and theoretical replication strategies (Yin 1994) to help identify similarities and dissimilarities during cross case comparison. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews, direct observations, participant observations, and analysis of documentation and archival records. Our findings suggest that localized action at the expense of global coordination exacerbates the tension between standardization and customization. Furthermore, attempts to address the tension through the logics of spatial and temporal separation proved largely ineffective, as these initiatives put added pressure on the sensemaking processes responsible for guiding collective action. Our findings further suggest that a paradigm modification might be useful for service providers, where they shift their focus from reducing equivocality to improving their internal ability to respond to it. The results of this study contribute to a large body of outsourcing literature that has too often neglected a provider centric perspective. By uncovering key factors that exacerbate the tension within and between organizations, and providing practical methods for addressing them, this study also offers valuable insight for practicing managers.

A Contextualist Approach to Telehealth Innovations By Sunyoung Cho Abstract Healthcare is considered one of the most important social issues in the U.S. as well as in other societies with ever-increasing costs of medical service provision. The information-intensive nature of the healthcare industry and the perception of information technology (IT) as a way to ease up healthcare costs and improve quality have lead to increased use of and experiments with IT-based innovations. These activities present interesting research opportunities for IS researchers and they have led to an increasing body of knowledge on healthcare information systems. This research aims at contributing to this line of research by adopting a contextualist approach to examine the adoption, use, and further diffusion of telehealth innovations. A contextualist approach provides a particularly interesting and relevant perspective to study adoption and diffusion processes of healthcare innovations. The adopted contextualist approach is process-oriented, it applies multiple levels of analysis, and it accommodates different theoretical lenses to make sense of the two telehealth innovations under investigation. A key assumption is that innovations should be understood as ongoing processes of change, not just technologies, or isolated change events with clear boundaries. Healthcare innovations have in this view much broader connotations, including development of IT-based applications, their adoption and diffusion over time, and the interactions between many stakeholders and organizations that shape the innovation in a specific context. The contextualist approach suggested by Pettigrew is adopted as an overarching framework for multiple studies based on empirical investigation of two telehealth innovations; the main focus is on a telestroke innovation in the U.S. while a radiology innovation in Sweden serves as a complementary case. Each study is documented as an independent research publication with its own theoretical perspective and contributions. The overall contextualist approach and the related findings are then summarized across the individual studies. Telehealth innovations are particularly interesting examples of healthcare information systems. They leverage contemporary network infrastructures and interaction devices to allow provision of healthcare services, clinical information, and education over distance, thereby reducing the costs and improving the availability of medical services. The two telehealth innovations are investigated through in-depth case studies. This theses summary presents the theoretical background for the studies; it motivates and details how the qualitative case studies based on critical realist assumptions were designed and conducted; it outlines the resulting research publications; and it discusses the contributions of investigating telehealth innovations from a contextualist approach.

Information technology (IT) projects are prone to failure. One explanation for the high failure rate among IT projects is that managers overly commit to a failing course of action, a phenomenon referred as escalation of commitment. While the notion of goals and commitment are central to the phenomenon of escalation, very few prior studies have investigated their impact on escalation. In this study, a research model rooted in goal setting theory is advanced to better understand escalation of commitment of IT project managers. A role-playing experiment with 350 IT managers was used to test the proposed research model. The results of the study suggest that IT managers are more willing to escalate their commitment under the influence of easy and vague goals compared to difficult and specific goals. Initial goal commitment of IT managers and the level of project completion were found to have a significant effect on IT manager’s willingness to continue. Initial goal commitment of IT managers was also found to moderate the relationship between goal difficulty and willingness to continue. In other words, when there is a higher level of goal commitment, an easy goal will have a greater effect in terms of promoting an individual’s willingness to continue.