Organizational Effects of Information Technology

The aim of this chapter is to better understand the enabling and inhibiting impacts IT has on lean manufacturing. This chapter provides a rich picture of a paper mill producing liner reels and the impact of a reel administration system on the manufacturing process. It is important that an IT tool supporting lean manufacturing reflects its organization. When it does the IT tool can act as an enabler of organizational change that in turn increase productivity and the production quality, when it fails to do so it inhibits organizational change and hampers the quality of production. The conclusion is that framing the definition of high production quality regarding product and process is important and that teambuilding would be a contribution to this end by enhancing perspective taking among the employees.

Green IS

In this chapter, the authors investigate the role of ICT in dealing with environmental challenges facing contemporary industrial organizations. Green IS research can essentially be divided into two groups, focusing on technology per se or on providing tools that decreases environmental impact. Building on a planned research project the authors propose innovation of ICT-based services, and especially collaborative services, as useful strategies for providing firms with sense and respond capabilities in relation to environmental challenges. They also argue research that research relevance and multi-disciplinary competencies are key themes that IS researcher needs to acknowledge in order to contribute to practitioners efforts.

From Systems and Tools to Networks and Infrastructures-from Design to Cultivation

The author argues in this chapter that the kind of IT solutions we are developing today and in the years to come, which are integrating numbers of systems across organizational and geographical borders, in many respects are significantly different from and more complex than information systems of yesterday. To succeed with the establishment of such solutions new understandings and development approaches are needed. Such new understandings, and approaches should be based on a perspective seeing such solutions as information infrastructures–not information systems. Infrastructures evolve over long periods of time. New ones are designed as extensions and improvements of existing ones–not from scratch. Therefore the new elements have to fit into the old regime. In this process the existing infrastructure, the installed base, influences heavily how the new elements can be designed. As the installed base grows its development and further growth become self-reinforcing. Successful development of infrastructures requires, first, the creation of such a self-reinforcing process, second, managing its direction. Strategies for creating and managing such processes are here called cultivation. Gateways are important tools used in such cultivation processes.

Technology, Agency, and Community

In this chapter, the authors consider whether and to what extent digital technologies enable people to accomplish expressive activities of personal or social value by examining customization and extension of software artifacts. They approach their topic within the context of multiplayer online games that provide a rather radical departure from the studies of organizational technologies that dominate the field. While less constrained by the rigid social order of organizations, the customization and extension of software artifacts in communities like those represented by multiplayer online games still confronts the central issue of the malleability of these artifacts and their power to shape human agency.

From Closed to Open

Most forestry machines being produced today include a PC that monitors and controls the harvester head, and an information system that stores data on every action the driver or the machine performs. ICT thus provides an opportunity to improve efficiency and competitiveness and possibly also opens up for new ways of working for actors in the forestry industry. The purpose of this study is to investigate how ICT can enable the transformation from selling products to selling services in the forestry industry. The author investigates this through performing a case study including a number of actors from the forestry industry in northern Sweden. First, he investigates the barriers for establishing an open innovation system in forestry. Then he describes the main steps to be taken and how the use of ICT can enable the establishment of such a system. The case study shows that the forestry industry is committed to working according to a traditional value chain and is committed to a closed innovation paradigm. He argues that the ICT component in Timbercut’s forestry machines constitutes a latent potential that can be fully captured through changing the business model and setting up a joint venture with Rewire.

Industrial Informatics and the Ecology of Innovation

The chapter provides an integrated view of value creation in the development of new products and services related to ICT. The authors argue that innovation ecologies are key aspects for enhanced innovation processes. Building on early experiences from a project focused on the innovation ecologies of its wide range of R&D projects the authors ask how such a focus can help organizations utilize important resources in an open innovation system and guide universities – as driving engines in R&D activity systems – to become key players in open innovation systems and simultaneusly radically improve milieus for research and education. Exploring the outcome from the project and how customers are integrated into value creation processes during the course of design and use, we argue that innovation systems management and customer integration are important assets not only to increased efficiency and quality, but also for enhanced innovation. The authors coin the term ‘ecology of innovation’ to sum up the potentials related to innovation and value creation.

Industrial Informatics

This book investigates information technology in the context of the process industry. When this context is examined, the implications of information technology go far beyond the contemporary accounts of IT in manufacturing processes – it also includes after-market sales, service production, sourcing, e-maintenance and so on. The sum effects of these changes are rapidly transforming the process industry.

Managing an Outsourcing Partnership

This chapter is an attempt to build on and extend existing outsourcing research by focusing on the process of managing an outsourcing partnership. Furthermore, it considers the role of information technology and the importance of establishing interorganizational trust in order to provide a deeper understanding of the partnership outsourcing phenomenon. The outsourcing partnership in focus in this chapter is between Alpha Corp., a large minerals group, and RDC, its remote service provider. The chapter shows that Alpha Corp.’s strategy for creating, maintaining and evolving the partnership with RDC occurs in three different stages: black-boxing of technology, establishing interorganizational trust, and performance based contracting. Given the multiple roles information technology assumes in an outsourcing alliance, this chapter also shows that understanding and managing the role of IT is crucial in maintaining a successful partnership. In addition, given the documented importance of information technology in outsourcing partnerships, there is a need to include trust in technology as yet another dimension in establishing interorganizational trust.

Living on the Edge

This chapter describes the efforts in ensuring research relevance by means of an industrial PhD project. The project is aiming at strengthening the relevance of research and development by educating scientists with an insight into the practical aspects of research and development and by developing networks in which knowledge can be effectively disseminated between industry and university. The project is taking its stand with an empirical and industrial centre with a technical solution called Dynamo, which is delivered by the company Logica. Dynamo, an intelligent portal that seamlessly connects systems, user information, roles and rule sets, and its context will provide a rich and useful empirical source from which to launch the action research process. The project contains two distinct stakeholders–industry and academy–jointly guiding the project and making sure that both worlds get a result that is in line with and contributes to their business. To this end two key stakeholders that have taken on the role as gatekeepers of rigor and relevance respectively. Taking position in the middle of the action is the PhD student who, by living the life of both researcher and consultant, will take on the role of balancing rigor and relevance. The chosen research approach together with the complex implementation context makes it crucial to take on an open minded selection.

The Crux of Integration

The purpose of this chapter is to identify and explore critical challenges for the process industry in IT infrastructure integration and adaptation. The authors identify four critical challenges in the integration and adaption of IT infrastructure in the process industry: integration as an ongoing process; maintaining stability in the installed base; locking the right stuff in; and balancing user value, continuity of production and compatibility. Given the centrality of IT infrastructure in today’s process industries the importance of dealing with these challenges must be emphasized. The four challenges identified in this study are of such a complexity they can only lend themselves to the evolutionary strategy. Such a strategy is in concert with the sensibility towards risk the authors find in the paper industry.