Understanding IT-enabled organizational change: A structurational perspective

Abstract

The implementation of Information Technology (IT) is always associated with a series of complex organizational change issues. For this reason, the literature on IT-enabled organizational change is growing large and spans across the field studies of management, organization, and information systems. Despite the numerous researches in IT-enabled organizational change, the change initiative projects continue to fail. In addition, there is a little consensus on the outcome of studies of IT-enabled organizational change. Previous research indicates that two particular issues arise from such failures, which are the conflicting results due to the differential of theoretical modela??s structure and the difficulty of contemporary change literature in informing the dynamic environment and customizable technology issues. This study aims to understand the reciprocal relationship between technology and organizations through the focus of structurational perspective. Thus, this study presents a theoretical framework in informing an overview and understanding of IT-enabled organizational change. This study asserts that the comprehensive attention on contextual elements, content, processes, and temporal issues is important. An in-depth case study in Alpha, the public organization in Singapore, is presented in this research. The case study illustrates how relationships amongst human actors, technology, and the contexts evolve over time in the dialectic and recursive way. Next, the research findings in this research are discussed. Academic and practical insights are offered through the analysis of case study.