Although organizational innovation with information technology is often carefully considered, bandwagon phenomena indicate that much innovative behavior may nevertheless be of the “me too” variety. In this essay, we explore such differences in innovative behavior. Adopting a perspective that is both institutional and cognitive, we introduce the notion of mindful innovation with IT. A mindful firm attends to an IT innovation with reasoning 1 Jane Webster was the accepting senior editor for this paper. Swanson & Ramiller/Innovating Mindfully with IT RESEARCH ARTICLE grounded in its own organizational facts and specifics. We contrast this with mindless innovation, where a firm’s actions betray an absence of such attention and grounding. We develop these concepts by drawing on the recent appearance of the idea of mindfulness in the organizational literature, and adapting it for application to IT innovation. We then bring mindfulness and mindlessness together in a larger theoretical synthesis in which these apparent opposites are seen to interact in ways that help to shape the overall landscape of opportunity for organizational innovation with IT. We conclude by suggesting several promising new research directions.

Despite a growing body of descriptive, theoretical and practical knowledge about Information Systems Development (ISD), large-scale information system development and implementation projects still fail in high numbers. The deeper causes of such failures are only partially understood. This study uses an action research approach in which prescriptions and recommendations drawn from research on and practice in ISD are utilized, assessed, and expanded in an ongoing large-scale ISD project. This study is undertaken to address this partial understanding of failure and to add some clarity of understanding of the interdependence of technical, social and behavioral elements of the ISD process. Our preliminary results confirm earlier findings that failure

Information systems (IS) or Information Technology (IT) projects are commonplace for organizations like insurance companies in today’s technologically evolving and business environment. Insurance companies are faced with IT projects of varying size and technical complexity and ensuring the success of these projects is of paramount concern for both firm leaders and project managers. IT project management can be defined as the application of formal and informal knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to develop a system that provides a desired level of functionality on time and within budget. This study presents an analysis of the Total Cost Management (TCM) tools and techniques that insurance companies should use to closely manage and monitor the scope, time, cost and quality of their IT projects. The purpose of this study is to identify and select the most relevant tools and techniques for each type of projects, whose main objectives can be whether to increase the revenues or reduce the costs. The implementation of the TCM methodology will help top management and project managers in their decision-making, to select projects and prioritize them, and give the final decision whether to go or not, and if they decide to go whether to make it or buy it. This analysis is all the more important than competition is tight and insurance companies are increasingly

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Software project escalation has been shown to be a widespread phenomenon. With few exceptions, prior research has portrayed escalation as an irrational decision-making process whereby additional resources are plowed into a failing project. In this article, we examine the possibility that in some cases managers escalate their commitment not because they are acting irrationally, but rather as a rational response to real options that may be embedded in a project. A project embeds real options when managers have the opportunity but not the obligation to adjust the future direction of the project in response to external or internal events. Examples include deferring the project, switching the project to serve a different purpose, changing the scale of the project, implementing it in incremental stages, abandoning the project, or using the project as a platform for future growth opportunities. Although real options can represent a substantial portion of a project’s value, they rarely enter into a project’s formal justification process in the traditional quantitative discounted cash-flow-based project valuation techniques. Using experimental data collected from managers in 123 firms, we demonstrate that managers

There is often a misconception that adopting and tailoring agile methods is straightforward resulting in improved products and increasingly satisfied customers. However, the empirical nature of agile methods means that potential practitioners need to carefully assess whether they are exposed to the risks that can make agile method adoption problematic. This is particularly the case with small software companies who are less able to absorb the impact of failed experimentation. This study describes a minimally intrusive assessment approach for small software companies preparing for agile method adoption and tailoring in the light of key risks. The approach has been conducted with six small software companies, three of which are presented to show the evolution of the approach, describe the resource commitment that companies have to make, and highlight the type of information generated from an assessment. The contribution of this study is that small software companies have an alternative to ‘mere experimentation ’ with agile methods and can take reasoned steps towards their adoption and

Abstract: The Information and Communications Technology (ICT) evaluation literature now spans several decades. Nonetheless, evidence continues to suggest that there remains a lack of formal ICT evaluation practices within organisations. Several challenges exist, not least the social and political contexts within which evaluation takes place and limitations in existing evaluation techniques. However, while ICT evaluation exercises have spanned many fields of study, an in-depth review of the ICT evaluation literature revealed that there is a paucity of ICT evaluation studies within the Higher Education sector. The 14 Irish Institutes of Technology (IoTs) have recently undergone an extensive transformation of their ICT systems. A national project launched by the Department of Education and Science and the Council of Directors of the IoTs performed a nationwide implementation of a suite of integrated Information Systems for library, human resources, finance and student management functions in order to standardise the ICT systems of the IoT sector. Yet, at the time of research, no formal evaluation of this project had been completed. This paper advances the body of ICT evaluation knowledge in the tertiary education sector through evaluating the impact of the Student MIS implementation within the IoTs. The research study was interpretive in nature; case studies based on multiple evidence sources were conducted in five IoTs. Analysis of the evidence led to the distillation of 15 findings on the Student MIS implementation which were centred on five key project areas – system selection, system development in the Irish IoTs, system

Most used terms in the thesis (the research papers excluded); diagram

Virtual salesperson (VS) has been increasingly implemented on many Websites to provide online users with valuable shopping advice, because it has been proved to alleviate users ’ cognitive overload and increase their decision quality. Thus, it has widely caught researchers ’ attention to investigate what factors can increase user’s intention to adopt. However, there is little research examining the impact of another information resource on VS adoption intention when recommendation information

What can an organization do when it has an opportunity to innovate with IT and faces pressure to improve operations – but lacks the capabilities necessary to conduct IT-related organizational change efforts? In this paper, this challenging situation is explored with the help of the resource-based view of the firm. A case study of digital radiology implementation in a healthcare organization was conducted. In the case, the change process did not follow the canonical view of how IT-related change should be conducted. Instead of a socio-technical, balanced change approach, where technology, processes, organizational structures and people change in concert, this case exhibited successive, focused change efforts targeting one organizational resource or capability at a time. The unorthodox change approach – a resource/capability re-balancing act rather than a case of balanced, socio-technical change – proved successful. The paper finds that pushing organizational change with technology may be a successful emergent strategy for IT-related change under difficult conditions. It also finds that by focusing one organizational resource or capability in each phase of a change effort, both short-term small wins and longerterm improvement of the organization’s dynamic capabilities may be possible.