icegov2012 proceedings

Enterprise Systems and Government Organizational
Changes: A Socio-Materiality Analysis
Loni Hagen
Department of Informatics
SUNY at Albany
1400 Washington Ave
Albany, NY 12222
(518) 442 3300
lkim3@albany.edu
ABSTRACT
Advocates of Enterprise Systems argue that such systems promise
many advantages to government organizations, such as enhancing
performance, transparency, accountability and efficiency.
However, the fulfillment of these promises is not easy to establish.
The socio-materiality framework provides a useful way to
evaluate Enterprise System implementation by investigating
technology use in everyday practice over time.
This study of the usage of the On-Nara system (a Korean
government Enterprise System) suggests that particular structures
of technology use develop in relation with institutional conditions,
and responsibilities of users, as well as associated technologies in
use. We argue that an Enterprise System can bring unintended
(not necessarily negative) micro-level organizational changes.
Further, we found that initially inflexible Enterprise Systems gain
flexibility when used in combination with other internetconnected
technologies.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.6.1 [Computing Milieux]: Project and People Management –
Systems Analysis and Design
General Terms
Management, Human Factors, Theory
Keywords
Socio-Materiality, Practice Theory, Electronic Government,
Public Management, Enterprise System, Materiality, IT Impact,
Organizational Changes
1. INTRODUCTION
The socio-materiality framework was developed to examine the
interaction between technology and users after systems go-live.
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ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, United States, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10…$15.00.
470
Donghee Sinn
Department of Information Studies
SUNY at Albany
1400 Washington Ave
Albany, NY 12222
(518) 442 3300
dsinn@albany.edu
We choose the Korean National Police Agency as an empirical
setting for a case study of the On-Nara System, an Enterprise
System that the Korean Government developed to transform the
way the government works.
In this study, we aimed to learn: (1) What material capabilities of
technology do users adopt and creatively shape in a particular
organizational context?; (2) What are the changes in the users’
routines after the introduction of the technology in this
organization?; and (3) How do the System’s provisions and
features for the goals of improving efficiency and transparency
appear to be used?
Going beyond the question of how a technology is appropriated in
specific environments, we endeavor to understand the process of
human interaction with technology wherein the socio-materiality
of the human-technology nexus is constituted, and recursively
reconstituted, as an emergent structure of technology-in-use.
2. THEORETICAL FOUNDATION:
SOCIO-MATERIALITY FRAMEWORK
Wanda Orlikowski developed the socio-materiality framework to
support the argument that technological materiality is inextricably
bound up with everyday life [4]. The socio-materiality approach
reconfigures the notion of “agency,” as a capacity realized
through associations and networks of humans and materials as
well as organizations, rather than simply inherent in human beings
[3].
The Socio-materiality view posits that humans and technologies
are inseparably entangled with each other in association with
organizational realities that agents build and change [3][4]. In
organizational practices, the need to accomplish task goals with
the available technologies can result in adjustments of routines.
This explains why improvised usage of technical features can
override the originally intended purposes [5]. While
acknowledging that technological properties have inscribed in
them the designers’ intentions and knowledge at the time of
development, this view focuses on the selection and modification
of particular technological capabilities by users [1].
This approach is especially useful for examining internetconnected
technologies where relationships between use and
properties are complicated and constantly changing as new
artifacts and configurations are connected to current technologies
[2]. Nowadays, internet-connected technologies, including
Enterprise Systems, are omnipresent in governments. One of the