Exploring enterprise social systems & organisational change: Implementation in a digital age

Kumar, Vikas; Loonam, John; Allen, J. P.; Sawyer, Steve

Abstract

Information systems (IS), since their introduction into organisations over five decades ago, have promised to streamline business processes, integrate disparate systems, increase innovation, and offer greater competitive advantage. Over the past decades, the evolution of Information Systems have mirrored many of the challenges experienced by our work organisations. For example, throughout the 1980s a primary concern for many organisations was the attainment of competitive advantage within their respective industries (Porter, 1980). The IS field responded by developing systems that sought to provide management with timely information to assist in making better strategic decisions, e.g. executive support and decision support systems. In the 1990s, organisations began to look inwards searching for key strategic resources that would yield unique core competencies (Barney, 1991). Similarly, the IS field responded by building highly integrative enterprise-wide systems (Davenport, 1998), which would unite every pillar of the organisation with a single transparent view of firm competencies and business processes, viz Enterprise Systems. The first decade of the 21st century continued in this vein, with organisations extending their global reach through new and innovative business models (Johnson et al, 2008). Similarly, IS have responded with the emergence of digital technologies and their continued growth as transformative organisational systems enabling boundary-less corporate structures, 24/7 real-time customer-centric communication, collaborative supply chain environments, and virtual IS infrastructures delivered via cloud computing.

• Journal Article Type: Review
• Acceptance Date: May 11, 2016
• Publication Date: Jun 1, 2016
• Deposit Date: May 16, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 15, 2017
• Journal: Journal of Information Technology
• Print ISSN: 0268-3962
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 31
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 97-100
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2016.13
• Keywords: information systems, organisational change, digital age, web 2.0
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/920632
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/jit.2016.13
• Additional Information: Additional Information : This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Journal of Information Technology. The definitive publisher-authenticated version Kumar, V., Loonam, J., Allen, J. and Sawyer, S. (2016) Exploring enterprise social systems & organisational change: Implementation in a digital age. Journal of Information Technology, 31 (2). pp. 97-100 is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/jit.2016.13
• Contract Date: May 16, 2016