Making Ideas Work: Obstacles for Successful Translation of the Integrated Approach of IT Management

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
In the early 1980s a user-organization-oriented approach of IT management came forward focusing on both the integration of technological and organizational systems design and participatory organizational transformation, with special attention to user involvement. The integrated approach never settled down solidly. To intrude the mainstream managerial discourse, the integrated approach of IT management is presented as a seductive concept, promising to solve experienced difficulties of the former technology-led approach. But, paradoxically, the strength of its rhetoric is the weakness of its application, due to problems in the translation of promising core ideas into day-to-day practices of IT development. Translation is not just a matter of rational calculation. Translation often takes place unintentionally, as part of an ongoing and power-based process of implicit meaning formation. Hence, the translation of promising core ideas is always subject to the influence of slowly changing (implicit) power processes in organizations. Based on a conceptual model of translation processes, we detect major translation obstacles, as critical factors of success, in the introduction, adoption, and implementation of the integrated approach of IT management. We illustrate this process analyzing development and applications of the integrated approach of IT management in a large bank

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: