فعالیت های پویا برای مدیریت تغییر سازمانی سیستم اطلاعاتی فعال Dynamic Activities for Managing an IS-Enabled Organizational Change

1 Introduction This paper presents the results of an interpretative grounded theory (GT) study (Glaser 1992, 1998) in an information system (IS) change process where the participating organizations had conflicting demands for the IS change outcome. The customer and the vendor, the main participant organizations, have collaboratively developed the customer’s current IS since the end of the 1990s. The need to renew the ageing IS triggered the change. The customer’s long-term business goal was to gain a competitive advantage by supporting the future business model in which a variety of services would be offered along with the product sales. This required different kinds of customizations of the standard platform. The vendor aimed at developing a product that was scalable to a larger customer base. The vendor consequently emphasized the management of customerspecific configurations which can be easily maintained separately from the saleable IS product version. Although the participants had different strategic goals, their trustbased collaboration lasted and evolved over the years. IS change, also referred to IS-enabled organizational change, has been studied extensively (Heiskanen et al. 2013; Leavitt 1964; Markus and Robey 1988; Newman and Robey 1992). The research has included, for example, analyzing the relationship between IS and organizational change (e.g., Markus and Robey 1988), analyzing different types of IS change processes in organizations (e.g., Sabherwal and Robey 1995; Van de Ven and Poole 1995), presenting new sense making models (e.g., Lyytinen and Newman 2008), and examining IS change as a continuous process in which the situated actions affect the sociotechnical structures in the IS development (e.g., McLeod and Doolin 2012). Gersick (1991) has highlighted that it is important to understand the changes, no matter what their size, as they can be painful and emotionally difficult, potentially leading to failures (c.f. Allen et al. 2000). IS change initiatives are often conducted in multi-faceted partner networks where numerous technologies and skillsets are applied for the business benefits (Dittrich 2014; Lyytinen and Newman 2014). The complexity of infrastructures, aligning competing demands, and coping with business and IT units in distributed organizational structures make the IS change an uncertain process (Arvidsson et al. 2014; Guillemette and Pare´ 2012; Hanseth and Lyytinen 2010; Lyytinen and Newman 2008, 2014).