Introduction The task of deciding when and how to innovate is not an easy one. Consider the following managerial quandaries: . A CIO has joined a firm that lags in the adoption of emerging information technologies. He wonders: just how innovative should this firm be going forward, and what can be done to position it to be more willing and able to assume the challenge of early adoption? . A VP of marketing resides in a firm that generally leads in IT innovation, and must decide whether to endorse the immediate adoption of a particular innovation with major implications for marketing strategy. She wonders: are her firm's needs in this area and "readiness" to adopt sufficient to justify taking the lead with this specific innovation? If so, how should the assimilation process be managed? . A product manager must design a deployment strategy for an innovative software development tool. He wonders: how fast can this technology diffu

Acknowledgements: The development of NeBIC theory has benefited greatly from the detailed guidance of the editor, associate editor, and reviewers. I also wish to thank research associate Michael Williams and Arvin Sayam for their valuable assistance and healthy debate in maturing the ideas presented here. NeBIC: A Dynamic Capabilities Theory for Assessing Net-enablement We propose the Net-enabled Business Innovation Cycle as an applied dynamic capabilities theory for measuring, predicting, and understanding a firm’s ability to create customer value through the business use of digital networks. The theory incorporates both a variance and process view of netenabled business innovation. It identifies four sequenced constructs: Choosing new IT, Matching with Economic Opportunities, Executing Business Innovation for Growth, and Assessing Customer Value, along with the processes and events that inter-relate them as a cycle. The sequence of these theorized relationships for net-enablement asserts that choosing IT precedes rather than aligns with corporate strategy. The theory offers a logically consistent and falsifiable basis for grounding research programs on metrics of net-enabled business innovation. NeBIC Page 1 1

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.

Systematic software reuse has emerged as a promising route to improved software development productivity and quality. Many large corporations have initiated systematic reuse programs, and many reuse frameworks have been developed to guide organizations in these efforts. Yet, in spite of this, systematic reuse in practice has been difficult to achieve. In this paper we argue that a key inhibitor has been the incentive conflict inherent in traditional programs of reuse. We reach this conclusion based on an analysis of interview data gathered from 15 projects across eight different sites in a company once viewed as a leader in the reuse movement. We found that one key contributor to the absence of widespread systematic reuse in this firm was a perception among project teams that reuse was incompatible with prevailing project team priorities and incentives, such as to complete projects on time and within budget. Based on this finding, we undertake a survey of different approaches to establishing reuse described in the literature, and analyze them to determine whether incentive incompatibility is inherent in the nature of software reuse for larger organizations. We conclude that it is not, and provide guidance on how such organizations can design an incentive-compatible program of reuse, i.e., one that generates a climate in which developers and teams view reuse as having a more favorable ``value proposition'' according to

The extent of organizational innovation with IT, an important construct in the IT innovation literature, has been measured in many different ways. Some measures are more narrowly focused while others aggregate innovative behaviors across a set of innovations or across stages in the assimilation lifecycle within organizations. There appear to be some significant tradeoffs involving aggregation. More aggregated measures can be more robust and generalizable and can promote stronger predictive validity, while less aggregated measures allow more context-specific investigations and can preserve clearer theoretical interpretations. This article begins with a conceptual analysis that identifies the circumstances when these tradeoffs are most likely to favor aggregated measures. It is found that aggregation should be favorable when: (1) the researcher's interest is in general innovation or a model that generalizes to a class of innovations, (2) antecedents have effects in the same direction in all assimilation stages, (3) characteristics of organizations can be treated as constant across the innovations in the study, (4) characteristics of innovations can not be treated as constant across organizations in the study, (5) the set of innovations being aggregated includes substitutes or moderate complements, and (6) sources of noise in the measurement of innovation may be present. The article then presents an empirical study using data on the adoption of software process technologies by 608 US based corporations. This study—which had circumstances quite favorable to aggregation—found that aggregating across three innovations within a technology class more than doubled the variance explained compared to single innovation models. Aggregating across assimilation stages had a slight positive effect on predictive validity. Taken together, these results provide initial confirmation of the conclusions from the conceptual analysis regarding the circumstances favoring aggregation.

The “IT artifact ” and debates about the core of the IS field received a lot of attention in the last several years. This paper is a response to Benbasat and Zmud’s June 2003 MISQ paper “The Identity Crisis within the IS Discipline: Defining and Communicating the Discipline’s Core Properties, ” which argues that “the IT artifact and its immediate nomological net ” 1 constitutes “a natural ensemble of entities, structures, and processes ” that “serves to bind together the IS subdisciplines and to communicate the distinctive nature of the IS discipline. ” This paper starts by examining the meaning of “IT artifact ” and concluding that this term is too unclear to serve as a basic concept for delineating the field. Next it examines and disputes aspects of Benbasat and Zmud’s prescription for being more faithful to the discipline’s core. It suggests that their vision of tighter focus on variables intimately related to the “IT artifact ” creates problems and provides few of the benefits of an alternative vision centered on “systems in organizations. ” This alternative vision provides an understandable umbrella for most existing IS research and treats the discipline’s diversity as a strength rather a weakness. It provides a rationale for building on current knowledge and expertise, exploiting the discipline’s areas of competitive advantage in academia and business, defusing the IS discipline’s identity crisis, and helping increase its longterm contributions to academia, business, and society. Key words: IS core, systems in organizations, IS discipline, IT artifact, systems in organizations, work system, identity crisis of academic disciplines, nomological net, 1 For a definition and discussion of nomological net, see

While virtual communities become more and more dominant, little attention has been directed towards understanding the conditions for creating a successful community. Significant progress has been made in understanding the diffusion of collaborative tools in the workplace. We read stories about the extraordinary success of some communities, and about the harsh failure of others. This paper argues that lessons learnt from these stories should be analyzed using the theoretical foundations of Diffusion of Innovations theories, and systematized to create a set of guidelines for community creators to make their efforts more efficient. We begin by presenting a theoretical background for analyzing technology diffusion. We then analyze the stories of diffusion of ReachOut – a tool for peer support and community building developed in our Research Lab – in two different communities, using this theory. Finally, we propose a framework for planning for successful diffusion of collaborative tools, using our experiences with ReachOut.

This research used an e-mail from mock Chinese consumers to investigate how Australian educational institutions use e-mail for overseas marketing and customer service. Less than two out of three of the 212 institutions sampled replied to a simple e-mail asking about fees and entry requirements. Even less institutions answered the questions promptly, politely, personally, professionally and promotionally. Despite e-mail’s widespread use, these results highlight implementation issues with this new marketing and customer service tool. The study gives institutions benchmarks and insights for improving e-mail marketing and online customer service. Academically, this paper supports past organisational research that size and industry sector relate to adopting innovations, suggests new metrics for measuring Internet adoption and proposes future research agendas.

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This research used a typical e-mail query to investigate customer service by 491 properties from 13 international hotel chains. These five-star hotels had difficulty providing prompt, accurate, and timely e-mail responses to their customers. The results suggest significant differences in e-mail customer service, based on hotel location and the size of the hotel chain. The poor responsiveness and quality by many hotels illustrate that better e-mail policies and training would give hotels an immediate competitive advantage via improved e-mail customer service. The article closes with practical suggestions to improve e-mail customer service and future research avenues for academics.