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The recent introduction of a spate of data access applications, such as OLAP and data mining tools, has led to an increased interest on the part of both scholars and practitioners on how best to use and benefit from these tools. This paper reports on six exploratory case studies involving eight decision-makers and seven endusers. A process model based on the Value Chain is proposed and explained. Results show that database usage and information processing practices have indeed grown more sophisticated. Implications for practice and future research aimed at testing the Value Chain model are proposed.

Motivated by the growing importance of data quality in data-intensive, global business environments and by burgeoning data quality activities, this study builds a conceptual model of data quality problem solving. The study analyzes data quality activities at five organizations via a five-year longitudinal study. The study

Provided that organizational learning (OL) is a self-organizing process, a key lever to foster it is to supply organizations with occasions for learning by stressing events which induce it. This presumes knowledge about the causes of OL. Our paper attempts to contribute to a consolidated understanding about the causes of OL by reinterpreting respective assumptions of OL-concepts from a constructivist perspective on information: Applying Bateson’s (1981) definition of information, we show that assumptions of OLconcepts can be transformed into ‘differences which make differences’. Referring to Spencer Brown (1969), we then argue that ‘differences ’ do not represent objective degrees of unlikeness, but result from ‘drawing distinctions’. In the end, this implies that the causes of OL are self-made, that OL is an entirely- from causes to results- intrasystemic process, that whether or how an organization learns lies in its own hands, as it depends upon the distinctions it draws.

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This paper addresses the topic of the assessment of an organization's external environment and more particularly the lack of research providing conceptual foundations for developing suitable strategic information systems supplying managers with the necessary information and analysis tools to consider the key environmental aspects that are relevant to strategic decision making. Inspired by research in the field of domain and enterprise ontologies, this paper argues that the development of a formal model of the environment would help solve this problem. As a result, this paper develops a conceptual model of the environment that assembles the available but scattered knowledge on this topic and translates it into a more formal form that may facilitate the creation of environmental Twenty Seventh International Conference on Information Systems, Milwaukee 2006 1 information systems and tools and demonstrates its usefulness by applying it to analyze a concrete environment.

Drawing from advances in Organisation Studies and recent debates within Economic Sociology and the Sociology of Financial Markets, this paper proposes a theoretical framework that characterises the mutual adaptation between formal routines, rules and actual performances as iterative cycles of framing, overflowing and reframing of knowledge inputs and actions. This framework, combined with the ethnographic observation of the ‘engineering freeze ’ process at a leading automotive manufacturer, allows us to advance routines ’ theory by 1- capturing the dynamics of convergence and divergence between procedures and performances; and 2- improving our understanding of the influence of artefacts and distributed agencies on routines’ dynamics.

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Abstract. This paper was prompted by the growing ambiguity about what is meant by the term Community of Practice and what such communities are supposed achieve. Like John Lewis ' famous tag-line "Never Knowingly Undersold", the term "Communities of Practice " has proved to be both durable and capable of holding many levels of meaning and seems like an appropriate metaphor for the way that the term Communities of Practice is used by some. This paper will show how the use of the term has changed from the early exploratory works of Lave and Wenger (1991), through the later, more theoretical, works of Wenger (1998a) to the current, more "business friendly", version propounded by Wenger, McDermott and Snyder (2002). It will argue that, just as when buying goods from a retailer, when dealing with the Community of Practice, one should also follow the dictum 'let the buyer beware'. 1

Many industries today behave like a massively interconnected network of organizations, technologies, consumers and products. Perhaps the most dramatic and widely known example is the computing industry. In contrast with the vertically integrated environment of the 1960s and 1970s, today’s industry is divided into a large