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Article Excerpt
Abstract
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 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.
Keywords: Information technology innovation, organizing vision, organizational mindfulness, bandwagon phenomena, organizational mindlessness
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Introduction
Whether, when, and how to innovate with information technology--this complex and crucial question confronts managers in virtually all of today's enterprises. Yet, it is by no means clear that managers always engage the question in a deliberative way. Reminiscing about his experience as a Gartner Group analyst for enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in the 1990s, Erik Keller recalls the explosive growth in this market:
By the mid-1990s, ERP was a topic that was being bandied about in boardrooms. It wasn't just an information technology (IT) project, but a strategic business imperative.... The ERP genie was out of the bottle--every company needed to have an ERP implementation.... When I asked (one client) why he was embarking on an ERP program, he looked at me in a puzzled way and said, "No one ever asked me that before." After 45 minutes of further discussion, he could still not come up with a reason. (Keller 1999, pp. 45-46)
Such stories are familiar in information technology practice. Bandwagon phenomena (Abrahamson 1991; Abrahamson and Fairchild 1999 Abrahamson and Rosenkopf 1997) suggest that more than a little innovative behavior may be of the "me too" variety, where adopting organizations entertain scant reasoning for their moves. Especially where the innovation achieves a high public profile, as with ERP, deliberative behavior can be swamped by an acute urgency to join the stampeding herd, notwithstanding the high costs and apparent risk involved. How should we account for such seemingly "mindless" behavior (Fiol and O'Connor 2003)? What are its antecedents and effects? What implications might it have for the development and prospects of the IT innovations themselves? Indeed, what implications might it hold for the shaping of our own academic community's research agenda (Swanson 2000)?
On the other hand, perhaps we should regard such mindlessness as unsurprising. Consider IT innovation as a practical matter. It can be a daunting challenge to make sense of a major IT innovation in a way that fully considers its potential fit to the particular circumstances of a real organization. Some of the challenge may reside in the innovation itself; after all, given their frequently novel technological foundations, IT innovations are often subject to "several possible or plausible interpretations and therefore can be esoteric, subject to misunderstandings, uncertain, complex, and recondite" (Weick 1990, p. 2). But organizational difficulties also intrude, and the firm trying to make sense of an IT innovation may confront ambiguous, portentous, and disruptive issues of organizational transformation and strategic repositioning. In this light, to witness an organization jumping on the bandwagon in the pursuit of some widely touted "best practice" should perhaps be regarded as commonplace. Indeed, it may be more remarkable to observe an organization being fully "mindful" in its engagement with an IT innovation.
In fact, where IT innovation is concerned, we believe it is apposite to wonder at both mindful and mindless organizational behavior. We do so in this essay. Our overall aim is to explore both mindfulness and mindlessness and, in so doing, break new ground for research in the domain of IT innovation. (For recent reviews, see Fichman 2000; Gallivan 2001; Swanson 1994.) In particular, we undertake to theorize more richly than has heretofore been done about the constitution of organizational rationality and sensemaking, where IT innovation is concerned. To accomplish this, our approach takes an institutional view that is, in itself, relatively novel to IT research (Orlikowski and Barley 2001). The concept of mindfulness also enables us to offer a fresh perspective on IT innovation adoption, a phenomenon that in the past has often implicitly been framed as a good thing to do and the earlier the better. (For a broader discussion of pro-innovation bias in innovation research, see Chapter 3 in Rogers 1995.) Finally, we strive to connect IT innovation to larger issues of organizational capabilities and competence that are central to research in organization and strategy (Cohen and Levinthal 1990; Dosi et al. 2001; Hamel and Prahalad 1990; Kogut and Zander 1992; Nelson and Winter 1982; Teece 1998; Teece et al. 1997).
We proceed as follows. We first review the mindfulness concept as it has been developed by Karl Weick and his colleagues. To set the stage for extending mindfulness into the arena of IT innovation, we next introduce an institutional view that embraces both the IT innovation and the firm's innovation-engagement process. We then adapt mindfulness to the IT-innovation context, after which we draw instructive contrasts to the conditions and effects of mindlessness. We then outline a preliminary theoretical synthesis, bringing mindfulness and mindlessness together as dynamically interdependent complements, and we offer a related set of propositions to help frame future work around this pair of concepts. We close with a wider discussion of the possibilities for research in this domain.
Conceptual Foundations
Mindfulness in Organizations
Mindfulness, at its roots, is a psychological notion that reflects upon the cognitive qualities of the individual (Langer 1989b; Langer and Moldoveanu 2000). The key qualities of a mindful state of being are said to involve:
(a) openness to novelty; (b) alertness to distinction; (c) sensitivity to different contexts; (d) implicit, if not explicit, awareness of multiple perspectives; and (e) orientation in the present (Sternberg 2000, p. 12; see also Langer 1989a, p. 62).
Recently, the idea of mindfulness has been extended from individuals to organizations, and more specifically to high reliability organizations (HROs) (Weick and Sutcliffe 2001; Weick et al. 1999). HROs, such as naval aircraft carriers, nuclear power-generation stations, and air traffic control units, "operate in an unforgiving social and political environment, an environment rich with the potential for error, where the scale of consequences precludes learning through experimentation, and where to avoid failures in the face of shifting sources of vulnerability, complex processes are used to manage complex technology" (Weick et al. 1999, p. 83). Organizational mindfulness is necessary if an HRO is to avoid situations in which minor errors compound one another to precipitate catastrophic failure. High reliability, for these firms, means achieving a high resistance to intolerable failure.
For Weick and his colleagues, mindfulness is an organizational property grounded in, although not reducible to, the minds of participating individuals through a process of heedful interrelating (Weick and Roberts 1993). Heedful interrelating arises as individuals interpret and act upon a model of the organizational situation in such a way that they produce (and reproduce) that model in objective fact, fashioning their individual actions in accordance with the presuppositions that constitute their complementary (if not entirely shared) mental representations of the situation.
Although they take HROs as their point of departure, Weick and his colleagues argue for extending the mindfulness concept to other kinds of organizations:
longer term environmental conditions such as increased competition, higher customer expectations, and reduced cycle time create unforgiving conditions with high performance standards and little tolerance for errors. These conditions are likely to continue, as environments become more competitive, uncertain, turbulent, and complex (Weick et al 1999, p. 104).
In general, then, for any organization seeking reliability or, to speak more broadly, viability, mindfulness concerns the adaptive management of expectations in the context of the unexpected. It entails
the ongoing scrutiny of existing expectations, continuous refinement and differentiation of expectations based on newer experiences, willingness and capability to invent new expectations that make sense of unprecedented events, a more nuanced appreciation of context and ways to deal with it, and identification of new dimensions of context that improve foresight and current functioning (Weick and Sutcliffe 2001, p. 42).
As a concerted venture into the unexpected, innovation, we believe, constitutes a critical area for organizational mindfulness. Innovative initiatives are frequently a core part of a substantively mindful response to emerging opportunities and changing conditions (Van de Ven 1993). At the same time, efforts at innovation may themselves be more or less mindful. Accordingly, mindfulness plays a dual role in innovation, enhancing the recognition of organizational circumstances demanding an innovative response, while also fostering effectiveness in executing the response itself. Mindfulness, however, is not simplistically promotive of innovation. It may entail wariness in some circumstances, and where needed it may foster a resistance to jumping on innovation bandwagons (Fiol and O'Connor 2003, p. 66).
Accordingly, innovating mindfully may actually mean that the firm forestalls or foreswears a new initiative, as facts and conditions relevant to the local organizational context dictate.
What is true for mindfulness in organizational innovation overall also holds more specifically for IT innovation. Mindfulness as the nuanced appreciation of context and ways to deal with it lies at the heart, we believe, of what it means to manage the unexpected in innovating with IT. But taken by itself, this rather general observation begs the question of what the context really comprises where IT innovation is concerned. Attempting to answer that question sets one down the path toward a conceptualization of mindfulness that is specific to IT and its management. We begin that undertaking, next, with an examination of the institutional and processual nature of the IT innovation phenomenon.
The IT Innovation Phenomenon
We will start by defining IT innovation, in process terms, as the pursuit of IT applications new to an organization. Our view is therefore oriented around how IT comes to be applied in novel ways. (Swanson [1994] provides a typology.) The potential for new applications is commonly created by the emergence of enabling technologies that are new in their own right. Nevertheless, there may be significant lags between the first availability of a new IT and the eventual onset of important uses for it. Our view of innovation is also adopter oriented. Even laggards can meaningfully be said to be innovators (Rogers 1995).
While innovating with IT is at one level an organizational process (Fichman 2000; Gallivan 2001), it also takes place in a wider institutional field (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). While the firm is necessarily the site where the material instantiation of an IT innovation occurs, the innovation-as-concept simultaneously enjoys an existence at large, beyond the boundaries of any particular enterprise. We call the innovation in this form an organizing vision, which we define as a focal community idea for applying IT in organizations (Swanson and Ramiller 1997).
An organizing vision is a construction in discourse (Foucault 1972; Porter 1992; Ramiller 2001c) that emerges from a heterogeneous collective consisting of such parties as technology vendors, consultants, industry pundits, prospective adopters, business and trade journalists, and academics. The organizing vision is always a work-in-progress, evolving to incorporate the experiences, insights, and beliefs of these diverse interests. It defines the innovation it speaks to in broad strokes. In doing so, it provides a focus for the innovation's interpretation, aids in legitimizing it, and helps to mobilize associated material and commercial processes (Swanson and Ramiller 1997). It influences the sensemaking and decision making of prospective adopters. And eventually it advances the material innovation toward institutionalization and a taken-for-granted status (Scott 2000; Zucker 1987) or, alternatively, toward a collapse in credibility and eventual abandonment.
An organizing vision is commonly recognizable by one or a few "buzzwords" that serve as a topical label for the wider community discourse. Knowledge management, customer relationship manageent (CRM), and Web services provide recent examples. The proliferation of such buzzwords and the rapidity with which they come to prominence and then fade away are themselves hallmarks of the general milieu of IT innovation. This ebb and flow in discourse reflects the fact that every organizing vision has in effect a career, marked by rising and falling visibility, prominence, and influence over time (Ramiller and Swanson 2003). This discursive career parallels the material diffusion of the innovation itself (Wang 2002).
If an organization's mindfulness toward an IT innovation is a matter of careful attention to local specifics, the larger community's organizing vision is nevertheless the point of embarkation for the organization's sensemaking journey. How its members engage that vision will weigh heavily in the organization's determination of whether, when, and how it will innovate, and what measure of success it will enjoy (Ramiller 2001c).
The organization's engagement with the community discourse extends over time and evolves along with the organization's practical involvement with the material innovation. This brings us, then, to the processual character of IT innovation. In Figure 1, we depict a firm's involvement with an IT innovation as a mosaic of several interrelated processes and intentionalities. We note that while there is an inherently sequential order to the activation of these processes and intentionalities, once activated each process or intentionality is likely to remain more or less active over the course of the firm's innovation. Hence Figure 1 is not, strictly speaking, a stage model of innovation (see Wolfe 1994).
We introduce the concept of intentionalities in order to emphasize the goal-oriented and purposeful character of IT innovation. Among the intentionalities, engagement and achievement are positional" because they focus primarily on a state the organization strives to achieve. Commitment is transitional because it revolves around the change process itself.
We identify four processes: comprehension, adoption, implementation, and assimilation. (2) The firm's innovation journey begins with comprehension. Through the sensemaking efforts of its members, the firm engages the organizing vision in substantive terms and ponders the signals about its importance embedded in the broader community's reaction to it (Swanson and Ramiller 1997). As it learns more about the innovation, the firm develops an attitude or stance toward it (Rogers 1995, Chapter 5) and positions itself, in a basic way, as a prospective adopter or nonadopter.
If adoption is entertained, a deeper consideration of the IT innovation follows in which the firm typically develops a supportive rationale, or business case (see, for example, Orlikowski 1993). Organizational know-why becomes central to the deliberations among the participants (Swanson 2003). The organizing vision typically provides some general principles to draw on, but know-why demands attention to issues specific to the firm. Both the business value of the innovation and the challenge presented by the prospective change are likely to be weighed before the organization decides whether to proceed and commit its resources.
The implementation process that follows then calls for a myriad of considerations, choices, and actions that will shape the transition. Timing may be a crucial issue, relative both to the organization's own preparedness and to the readiness of the enabling technology and the maturity of complementary services in the larger community. Know-when is accordingly a focus of the organization's attention. Know-how also comes to the fore as the firm navigates the details of what may be, and commonly is, a perilous venture (Swanson 1988). Some of this know-how may need to be acquired in the marketplace, and here the larger community discourse may provide guideposts, although what is acquired will need tailoring to the firm-specific context. Bringing the innovation to productive life...
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