Paper info

THE DYNAMIC LEARNING OF SOCIO-TECHNICAL RESOURCE INTERACTION. AN INFORMATION SYSTEM’S EMBEDDING PROCESS

Min Tian

The paper was published at the 32nd IMP-conference in Poznan, Poland in 2016.

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Embedding of an information system with its targeted customer’s business process is a creation process of interfaces with the system’s contextual socio-technical resources. In this paper, I draw on the literature of resource interaction to investigate the dynamic learning process of resource interfaces from the developing, producing, and using settings on three iterations of an information system’s alignment process. The information system underwent a dynamic evolutionary development in which it was integrated with its contextual sociotechnical resources to form complex adaptive solutions. During this process, it is conceivable that the socio-technical interfaces of the information system are always exposed to frictions in terms of the customer and the firm striving to create stability or change by configuring the embedded resources. The on-going process of friction always requires the firm and the customer to teach each other about what happens to their resources and interfaces when the counterparts change and, particularly, about the possibility of making compatible changes. Therefore, the dynamic learning of resource interfaces is generated in the friction process. The fact that the IMP group has only produced minimal literature to date on the learning perspective of resource interaction leaves the door open for further contributions. Håkansson and Waluszewski (2002) stressed that seeking knowledge of resource interfaces between the focal technology and its socio-technical resource context makes it possible to identify and pursue the technology’s embedding. Furthermore, through an in-depth reflection of the commercialization of two technologies, Baraldi and Strömsten (2008) went one step further and systematically explored the resource interface knowledge of the focal technology’s sociotechnical embedding from three types of knowledge (physical knowledge, social knowledge and mixed knowledge). The abovementioned literature has mainly highlighted different knowledge of resource interface, but there is still a gap in terms of capturing the ongoing learning process with regard to how this knowledge is generated. By integrating the concept of resource friction into this learning perspective of resource interaction, this paper develops a dynamic learning perspective to capture the ongoing learning process in resource interaction. By using this dynamic learning perspective of resource interaction to scrutinize an information system’s embedding process, I will provide a typology of the resource interface knowledge in the process. As far as I can ascertain, no published studies have proposed this typology of resource interface knowledge in information system alignment process.