Lecture: Global but not Local: A Story of Workarounds, Compliance and ERP

Speaker: Professor Robert Davison,City University of Hong Kong

Time: 10:30 a.m., 15th March, 2019

Venue: Room 208, Tongji Building A

Abstract:

We undertake an exploratory case study to investigate how warehouse employees work around an ERP software that cannot be used as designed due to work practices required by local conditions. Our research illustrates how long-standing approaches to studying IS innovation, adoption, and diffusion in relation to fixed IT artefacts say little or nothing about important phenomena and practical issues. We draw on theories of work systems and IT innovation, adoption and adaptation to explain both why workarounds are required and how they are enacted. Our context involves the local Hong Kong operations of a global retailer of home textiles. Our 29 interviews at the site provide many perspectives about how an inadequate information system failed to support necessary work practices and how employees at the site responded by creating a shadow IT system that helped them pursue their business responsibilities and objectives. We draw on a compliance view of technology use to suggest that unreflective compliance can be counterproductive; paradoxically, reflective non-compliance may bring greater benefit to both the organization and its customers.

Bio:

Robert Davison is a Professor of Information Systems at the City University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on the use and misuse of information systems, especially with respect to problem solving, guanxi formation and knowledge management, in Chinese organisations. He has published over 90 articles in a variety of journals such as MIS Quarterly, the Information Systems Journal, IT&People, Journal of IT, Journal of the AIS, Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Decision Support Systems, Communications of the AIS, and Communications of the ACM. Robert chairs the IFIP WG 9.4 (Social Implications of Computing in Developing Countries) and is the Editor-in-Chief of the Information Systems Journal and the Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries. Robert travels extensively, seeking to understand how people in different contexts and cultures make sense of their lives with IS. As a researcher and as an editor, he seeks to promote both an inclusive and a local perspective to research.

Home Page: https://www.is.cityu.edu.hk/staff/isrobert