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IFIP WG8.6 Working Conference Diffusing Software
Product and Process Innovations Banff, April
7-10, 2001
Telling an Innovation Story
E. Burton Swanson The Anderson School at UCLA
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Outline

• Making sense of the buzz
• Basic concepts revisited
• Core processes
• Organizing visions and their careers
• Innovating with ERP
• The innovators dilemma
• Implementation and assimilation gaps
• Summary

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Buzzwords!

• What are they?
• Why so many in the world of IT?
• How should managers and researchers deal with
  them?

ERP!
E-commerce!
Data warehouse!
CRM!
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Basic concepts revisited

• Innovation- an idea, practice, or object new to
  the organization adopting it
• Often identified by a buzzword
• Examples ERP, CRM, Data warehouse
• Innovation diffusion- the process by which an
  innovation spreads over time among
  organizations
• Involves communication leading to adoption and
  implementation
• Typically involves more imitation than it does
  invention
• An organization innovates relatively early or
  late compared to others

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Core processes
understanding the innovation in terms of the
communitys organizing vision for it
deciding whether and when to undertake the
innovation, making a resource commitment
undertaking the project, making it happen,
bringing the innovation to life for its users
making the innovation a part of routine, everyday
practice
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Organizing visionRef Swanson and Ramiller, 1997

• A focal community idea for applying IT in
  organizations
• Typically identified by a buzzword
• Defines the innovation in broad strokes and is
  the basis for its comprehension
• Produced by and sustained through the communitys
  talk about it (e.g. at trade shows and in the
  trade press)
• Provides for interpretation (what is it?),
  legitimation (why do it?), and mobilization of
  entrepreneurial and market forces (in providing
  requisite products and services)
• Drives and is driven by the innovations adoption
  and diffusion
• Has a characteristic career (in terms of its
  visibility, prominence, and influence over time)

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Launching ERPRef Wylie, 1990

• ERP Environment Check List
• GUI
• SQL calls to RDB
• 4GL
• Client/server architecture
• Multiple DB support
• Integrated software and DB

• ERP Functionality Check List
• Hybrid process/discrete/distribution
• Production graphics
• Analytic graphics
• Internal integration
• Engineering
• Business core systems
• Data collection
• External integration

Recent events in hardware, operating systems and
applications are crystalizing (sic) our
definition of Enterprise Resource Planning
systems-- the Next-Generation MRP II.
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ERPs Career
Here comes SAP! (Fortune, 1995)
Whats all the buzz about? Simply put, R/3
seems to be a case of the right product at the
right time. (Xenakis, CFO, 1996)
The growing number of horror stories about
failed or out-of-control projects should
certainly give managers pause. (Davenport, HBR,
1998)
As 1999 winds down, it seems ironic that
enterprise resource planning (ERP) has again
attained almost the same dubious status it had
when the acronym entered the lexicon in 1990-
that of an idea that would never work. (Keller,
Manufacturing Systems, 1999)
(I)t becomes clear the enterprise resource
planning strategies were really designed to get
the corporate house in order. (Connolly,
Computerworld, 1999)
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Innovating with ERPSuccess correlates

• Know-why
• Business benefits (e.g., working better with
  customers and suppliers)
• Not other reasons (e.g. resolving Y2K problems,
  moving to a client/server environment)
• Know-how
• Top managements understanding of implementation
  costs
• Not underestimating task complexity
• Willingness to change business processes as
  needed
• User sophistication and facility with package
• Vendor support

Ref Swanson, Innovating with Packaged Business
Software in the 1990s, Anderson School at UCLA,
2000
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The innovators dilemmaOpportunity and risk
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Implementation gapsWhat happens when
implementation is long and problematic?
Implementation gap the difference at any time
between cumulative adoptions and implementations
Adoptions
Implementations
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Illustrative gapsRef Fichman and Kemerer, 1999
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Assimilation gapsFailing to achieve a new
competence

• Lack of infusion
• Breadth
• Depth
• Lack of learning
• Novice
• Expert
• Lack of acceptance
• Attitude
• Behavior
• Lack of routinization
• Change absorption
• Essentiality to work

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SummaryElements of a story

• Telling the story
• Focus on a firm, or on an industry
• Focus on a specific innovation, or on a family of
  related innovations
• Focus on an inter-organizational,
  inter-innovational field
• Focus on the discourse

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References

• Davenport, T. H., Putting the Enterprise into
  the Enterprise System, Harvard Business Review,
  July-August, 1998.
• Fichman, R. G., and Kemerer, C. F., The Illusory
  Diffusion of Innovation An Examination of
  Assimilation Gaps, Information Systems Research,
  10, 3, 1999, 255-275.
• Keller, E., Lessons Learned, Manufacturing
  Systems, November 1999, 44 ff.
• Ramiller, N. C., The Textual Attitude and New
  Technology, forthcoming in Information and
  Organization.
• Ramiller, N. C., Airline Magazine Syndrome
  Reading a Myth of MIS-management, forthcoming in
  Information Technology and People.
• Rogers, E. M., Diffusion of Innovations, 3rd
  Edition, Free Press, 1987.
• Swanson, E. B., Innovating with Packaged
  Business Software in the 1990s, Anderson School
  at UCLA, IS working paper 3-00, September 7,
  2000.
• Swanson, E. B., and Ramiller, N. C., The
  Organizing Vision in Information Systems
  Innovation, Organization Science, 8, 1997,
  458-474.
• Wylie, L., ERP A Vision of the Next-Generation
  MRP II, Scenario S-300-339, Gartner Group, April
  12, 1990.