Horizontal Information Systems:
Emergent Trends and Perspectives
“Braa and Rolland use a case study to show how
contemporary trends in information systems, such as
internetworking, globalization, and enterprise resource
planning, represent the emergence of
horizontal, rather than vertical information systems
development. Institutional responses, such as
standardization and knowledge management, create
tension in the communities of practice because
these conflict with the need for horizontal systems to be
flexible, intra-active and emergent.”
http://www.cs.auc.dk/~is2000/
The macro picture...
Globalization
“integration”
Internet
“enabling technologies”
Knowledge management
“management philosophy”
How do organizations
organize their business ?
“Horizontal organizations”
(Castells)
What is the role of IT ?
What type of systems and
what are the consequences ?
“Horizontal IS”
Dialectical and dynamical process!
Emerging Trend: “Internet”
• Interaction technology
– common standards a prerequisite
• Internet creates expectations
– interoperability
– local systems and components must be compatible with internet
standards
– ex 1: Lotus Notes -> web + Internet e-mail; SAP R/4
– ex 2: “legacy systems” -> Intranet
– ex 3: LAN -> TCP/IP
– ex 4: HTML -> XML (eXtensible Markup Language - publishing
and document interchange format) - W3C
• Implications
– “Everything is connected to everything”
– System: order, overview and control
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Emergent Trend: Knowledge
Management
• Knowledge not “one thing”
– tacit <-> explicit
– Nonaka “The Knowledge Creating Company”
• The organizations ability to create “new” knowledge.
• Transforming tacit to explicit knowledge
• Knowledge management
– creating, distributing & coding knowledge - but human action and
knowledge are inseparable (structuration theory, Giddens)?
– “organizational memory” - but organizations do not need a library?
– KM => “sustainable competitive advantage”?
• Same old problems - new wrapping ?
– sharing information/knowledge -> CSCW
– prisoner’s dilemma, critical mass
Emergent Trend: Globalization
• Increasing economical and political
interdependencies...
– Organizations are a part of this
– Clusters/networks of organizations -- The network
society
– Global markets: education, books, insurance,
banking…
• Castells...
Interdependencies in the organization
• Organizations deploy IT as a means for increasing control and
coordination
– increasing interdependencies:
• common standard
• between work practices, technologies
– “moving” work (Button & Sharrock)
• consequences for the flow of work (coordination, collaboration)
– work arounds:
• “True universality is necessarily always out of reach” (Bowker & Star)
• Side-effects
– means less control
• Implications:
– IT not unlimitedly enabling. The duality of technology: always both
enabling and constraining (Orlikowski)
– who’s in control: managers, designers or technology?
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Vertical/Hierarchical IS
• Vertical information systems:
– reducing uncertainty by providing upper management with more
and better information (Galbraith)
– relatively easy to identify user groups
– designed from scratch
– Ex: sentralt lønns- og regnskapssystem (transactions - not
interactions)
• Horizontal information systems
– sharing information/coordination between communities-of-practice
– cut horizontally across the organization/organizations
– interaction technology-- need for standards (Middleware, Internet,
XML…)
– designed “on top of/interfaces to other systems/infrastructures”
– Ex: Intranets, saksbehandling, “big” groupware, distributed
systems, “Knowledge Management Systems”
Communities of practice
• Organization
– ...as designed - the institution
– ...as day-to-day practices
• “A community-of-practice is a unit of analysis that cuts
across formal organizations…” (Bowker & Star, p. 294)
• A social theory of learning (Wenger)
– learning is a part of every human activity
– CoP are the key to an organization’s competence and to the
evolution of that competence (Wenger, p. 241)
Horizontal Information Systems
• ...systems for supporting and “linking” communities-ofpractice
• …must provide boundary objects
– objects that both inhabit several communities of practice and
satisfy the informational requirements of each of them
– are weakly structured in common use
– are strongly structured in individual use
– meaningful information across contexts
“The toughest problems in information systems design are
increasingly those concerned with modeling cooperation
across heterogeneous worlds, of modeling articulation
work and multiplicity” (Bowker & Star, p.308)
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HIS: challenges
• Increasing the interdependencies in the organization
• Undermining the interpretative flexibility of artifacts
• Lack of control because of unintended side-effects
created
• Necessity of continuously negotiating and maintaining
interfaces
• Aligning the variety of different communities of
practices
• Horizontal IS constitute an installed base
Case: overview
order
delivery
New building phase
• design and
specification
approval
• approval
• certification
• survey
Application
Application
Common
product model in an
SQL database
In-service phase (Ships in operation)
• planning and reporting
• internal memos
•certification
Application
Knowledge creation
and sharing through
the use of a
horizontal
information system in
all three phases
A surveyor’s
Work
Horizontal
IS
The Horizontal Information System
Common operating system, file formats, data communication protocols, hardware platforms etc.
Infrastructure
Standardisation on all levels
Pre-contract phase
scrapping
Standardization vs. flexibility
• Communities-of-practice at MCC
– different offices around the world
– engineers (ex: surveyors) from different disciplines
– implications: conflicting requirements to the system
• Negotiating and maintaining interfaces
– design decisions are increasingly complicated because they tend to
involve negotiations with different stakeholders
– stakeholders: interest groups & technologies
– Ex: paper-based checklists incorporated into the system
• Aligning the variety of communities of practice
– must provide flexibility in order to be able to implement the system
– Ex: checklists (aligning users, developers & management)
– Ex: how reports are used in different communities become
important. To hard standardization results in work-arounds.
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Installed base and side-effects
• Difficult transition from Mainframe system
– “information-based lock-in”
– also the new product model becomes hard to change
(side-effect of the new system)
• Side-effects:
– more office work -- less engineering work
– double checking information provided
– exchanging more informal information
• Hypotheses:
– too standardized - less information into the system?
– but has a role as a “community builder” and thereby
important for coordination and knowledge sharing?
Concluding remarks
• Challenging to implement horizontal IS in a hierarchical
organization (Claudio: shared databases in hierarchies does
not work)
• MCC is more or less forced to standardize its services in
order to provide increased flexibility for customers
• Too large transitions attempted -- must preserve some of
the flexibility
• Systems development is not an isolated activity
– installed base
– interest groups
– organizational change
• Unpredictable changes due to side effects
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