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Part 3: Structures and Networks; International audience; Prior research provides conflicting insights about the link between investment in enterprise systems and firm value and in the ES governance mechanisms. The literature generally suggests that management should cultivate its technical and organizational expertise to derive value from currently deployed Enterprise Systems (ES) [8]. In the realm of practice, ERP vendors and configuration/integration partners strongly recommend the creation of an organizational structure to govern the ERP implementation and post-implementation process to improve project success and extract greater value from the ES investment. The ES literature, while unclear on the formation, and functioning of ES governance units, suggests the need for formal and fixed governance structures. This research utilizes Deleuze’s assemblage theory and emergence theory to explain the genesis and evolution of the governing ‘structure’ known as the Competency Center (CC). Our results illustrate the business needs driving the structuring processes behind the CC, are also those that lead to unintended and destabilizing outcomes. Whether the CC ‘assemblage’ survives to provide value depends on how the emergent issues are handled and how the assemblages are “positioned”. This research suggests effective ES governance is not derived from a prescribed step-wise process yielding formal structures, but rather form an organic process of assemblage.

Other disciplines now lay claim to research topics belonging to the domain of IS research, and the field itself is under challenge in academic institutions around the world. Thus having a clear conception of those concepts lying at the core of our field and which establish the legitimacy of Information Systems (IS) as an independent discipline is more important than ever before. This manuscript seeks to contribute a clearer understanding of what we mean by the central issues driving the field. But this manuscript takes a new twist by approaching this question from the point of view of a set of French IS scholars and social theorists. It advances the discourse by examining how French scholars, many of whom are not well known outside of French academic circles, may impact our reading of those issues considered to be most persistent and frequent in the IS literature. Festschrift Marco de Marco

Design discipline has been relatively slow to recognize the existence and impacts of postmodernism as compared to sociology, political science, marketing and management disciplines, however, recently postmodernist implications have begun to be explored by design scholars. Yet our review of the literature led us to conclude that the relationship between postmodernism and design thinking has received little, if any attention from design management scholars. The objective of this paper, then, is to expand the discussion on the relationship between postmodern organization and design thinking, to suggest strategic implications for design managers and research opportunities for management scholars. Keywords: design, design thinking, management, postmodernism, postmodernity

Problems related to dysfunctional communication and collaboration between business and IT professionals have been discussed for decades. This distortion in communication can partially be explained by the Critical Social Theory and Jurgen Habermas' notions of communicative action and Univeral Pragmatics, which differentiate between ideal communication and types of "distorted communication." The present research sees that success in this performative linguistic process of ISD calls for shared understanding and communication between participants to the process, leading to agreement on the meaning of the requirement and itsconcomitant elements and desired outcomes. This paper shows how the Work Systems method (Alter) can be used to reduce communicative distortion from the requirement gathering process by creating something more akin to Habermassian communicative action.

This study in progress paper describes a research program studying the role of ERP and BI competency centers (CC) in a range of firms from six countries in Europe, North America and Austral-Asia. The goal of this research is to understand the relative contribution of CC in improving IS and business unit performance and to map structures and models of extant successful competency centers worldwide. We deploy a mixed-method design combining qualitative and quantitative approaches appropriate to descriptive and exploratory research.

Fundamental difficulties in understanding and communicating about IT-reliant systems contribute to longstanding problems with project management, user participation, specification of requirements, implementation in organizations, business/IT alignment, and IS failures. Those issues persist despite having been explored, described, theorized, and measured in hundreds of IS research articles. The paper reports on a design science research project demonstrating a possible path toward addressing these longstanding problems by empowering business professionals to analyze systems in business terms, and not in UML, BPMN, or other formalisms that were developed for IT specialists. In this research, 75 working business professionals with extensive business experience used the latest iteration of a work system analysis template to analyze IT-reliant work systems in their own work sites, and recommend improvements. Unlike earlier work system research at the original developer’s university, the current research occurred in conjunction with three MBA programs at a major east coast university in the United States. Analysis of 75 submissions confirmed that participants could use the work system analysis template effectively. As expected in design science research, the analysis of the submissions led to recommendations for improving the design artefact.

We analyze five commentaries to our ‘Socio-theoretic Accounts of IS: the Problem of Agency’ paper. We find more commonalty in the way we think about theory and theory development in the IS field than expected, and clear up some misconceptions about our intentions. Actor network IS theorists are reluctant to accept the way we frame the problem of agency and we consider some of their arguments and propose counter arguments.