Paper info

Technical Consultants and Organisational Learning in IT Purchase Situations

Philip Dawes

The paper was published at the 17th IMP-conference in Oslo, Norway in 2001.

Though it is widely acknowledged that both organisational learning and thepurchasing of IT products are important areas for study, it is surprising to find thatvery little research has explicitly linked these two areas together. As a result, the keyreason for undertaking this research is to begin to address this gap in the literature bydeveloping a model which is based on a review of the extensive literature onorganisational buying behaviour, organisational information search, andorganisational learning. In addition, a key contribution of this research is to model theeffects that outside IT consultants are likely to have on the processes of informationsearch and organisational learning in firms purchasing this type of product.