IT-enabled change: evaluating an improvisational perspective

This paper presents an empirical study into a hierarchical organization's experience with the adoption and use of an adaptive information technology, in this case a workflow application. The paper takes an improvisational perspective on the change process and assesses it through a case study which examines the organization's experiences in terms of anticipated, opportunity-based and emergent changes to their processes, structure and culture that were enabled by the introduction of the workflow application. The findings build upon Orlikowski and Hofman's improvisational change model by evaluating the model in a different organizational context to that of the original study. The findings reveal that ongoing improvisational changes can occur in hierarchical organizations and that improvisations and adaptations can occur in organizations which adopt adaptive IT provided that ongoing support for change management is forthcoming. The findings also suggest that there is a correlation between the level of customer dissatisfaction and the emergence of any local improvisations regardless of the organization type. This implies that an improvisational perspective may be useful for hierarchical organizations which introduce new technology as the local improvisations which can occur may be leveraged for advantage. The study also raises important questions about the categorisation of technologies as adaptive and critically reflects on this aspect of the improvisational change model.