Users appropriate a technology innovation as they adapt and adapt to its capabilities. This paper argues that the appropriation of technology innovations – information and communication technologies such as devices and systems – is actually part of the design process. The design of a technology innovation is completed by users as they appropriate it. The contributions of the paper are to draw attention to the crucial role played by users’ actions in completing the design process and to examine the implications for the design and implementation of technology innovations. The challenge for designers is to design malleable technologies that can be adapted to users’ organisational, social and personal practices, and then to harvest users’ needs from the appropriated innovation in order to improve its design. For managers, trainers and IS staff involved in the implementation of innovations, the challenge is to encourage and support users’ appropriation activities.

This paper draws on the need to understand how mobile technology is implemented and used at the organisational level. IT is a general-purpose technology and therefore its use involves a high degree of uncertainty and ambiguity. Moreover, IT vendors and system developers tend to be very unambiguous in their rhetoric about mobile technology opportunities. Therefore, managers have trouble to identify the real scope, the functionality and the impact of new mobile applications. However, these three types of uncertainties need to be handled in change management projects where new information technology is involved. Gradual uncertainty reduction at these three different levels, i.e. what technology can do; will technology work; and will users adopt it, is studied in this paper. This is achieved through an analysis of the implementation process of an information system where mobile terminals are used to give service technicians access to the ERP system at BT Europe, a leading supplier of forklift trucks. The analysis shows how the three levels of uncertainty interact, and how the computerised parts of the information system are complemented by mindful intertwining with the non-computerised communication and manual data processing, in order for the information system to work.

Motivation. Software maintenance is a significant part of the software life-cycle cost. Current research focuses on the maintenance of application software. Despite increased focus on systems integration, there is limited research on maintaining integrated systems. Before progressing with informing software integration practice, researchers therefore need to better understand the actual work of maintaining integrated systems. Research. To this end, a study of maintaining an integrated system in practice has been conducted. The study is conducted in the context of a community of volunteer software integrators. The research combines field studies with document analysis, asking: RQ1: How is knowledge of software failures developed during geographically distributed software maintenance? RQ2: How do software developers build knowledge of how to replace a businesscritical software system? RQ3: What are the characteristics of large-scale software maintenance work in a geographically distributed community of volunteers? Contributions. The main empirical contribution offered by this thesis is insight into the social

INFORMATION

Beyond people and tools, what is the place for the organization in the analysis of ICT uses?

In this theoretical synthesis, we juxtapose three traditions of prior research on user participation and involvement: the survey and experimental literature on the relationship between user participation and IS success, the normative literature on alternative development approaches, and qualitative studies that examine user participation from a variety of theoretical perspectives. We also assess progress made in the three bodies of literature, and identify gaps and directions of future research for improving user participation.