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This paper presents a structured literature review of studies on IT-enabled organizational transformation to determine the state of the art and to identify areas for future research.

We collect 201 academic publications on IT-enabled organizational transformation and analyze them from three perspectives: a publication perspective, a research perspective and a conceptual perspective.

From a publication perspective, we identify and synthesize the seminal works to provide a brief history of research on IT-enabled organizational transformation. From a research perspective, we show that studies in this area have seldom been grounded in theory and have predominantly used qualitative approaches, while only a few studies have drawn from quantitative data. From a conceptual perspective, we show that most research has studied higher levels of transformation, especially process redesign.

This review presents the landscape of the literature on IT-enabled organizational transformation, which provides a foundation for future research.

Enterprise content management (ECM) is an important topic in information management, but researchers have long had difficulty developing a consistent definition. The purpose of this paper is to analyze ECM case reports from practice to identify ECM’s objectives, processes and technologies and to provide a foundation on which ECM can be conceptualized and defined.

This paper assembles more than 1,200 case reports on industrial ECM implementations in order to characterize the ECM concept from a practitioner’s viewpoint. The paper provides a descriptive overview and historical examination of ECM implementations over time and across countries and industries, grounded in a structured content analysis.

Even though the case reports share some commonalities, their ECM projects differ considerably in terms of their objectives, processes and technologies, and vary widely across countries and industries. In addition, ECM implementations are much broader today than they once were, so the scope and boundaries of the ECM concept are increasingly blurred in practice.

While several researchers have characterized the ECM concept based on literature reviews, only a few have approached the definition problem from a practical viewpoint. This paper provides a foundation from which to evaluate how well researchers’ conceptualizations of ECM match current business practice.

Human presence tends to decrease biodiversity and often results in the local extinction or even global extinction of megafauna. The focus here is on how humans have affected wolf populations in what are now known as the contiguous 48 United States. While the arrival of indigenous peoples to the region produced the extinction of some species and a reduction in wolf populations, the cultural values and economic system, i.e., capitalism, utilized by the European invaders led to anthropogenic decimation of wildlife species on an unprecedented scale and the near local extinction of wolves. Although capitalism almost led to the local extinction of wolves in the contiguous 48 US states, it also produced an educated, affluent urban class concerned with protecting endangered species. Unlike farmers and ranchers, this urbanized class does not view wildlife as a potential economic threat. The vast majority of contemporary Americans, i.e., 96%, do not engage in sport hunting, so most do not view apex predators as unwanted competitors for game species. Moreover, many individuals who belong to the urban affluent class, even those who do not engage in wildlife viewing or other forms of outdoor recreation, value biodiversity. Since the late twentieth century, this has resulted in the preservation of existing wolf populations and reintroducing wolves to some of their historical ranges. These trends are likely to continue in the coming decades. However, capitalism should not be viewed as a system that initially decimated wolf populations and eventually created an economic class that saved them. It is argued that, due to its growth imperative, if left unchecked, capitalism will ultimately destroy wolves and many other species that have been granted temporary reprieves from extinction.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize an information technology (IT) initiative at Hilti Corporation that began with a local IT need and ended with the global transformation of the company’s customer service processes and infrastructures. The authors highlight 12 lessons learned from the transformation, which Hilti referred to as the Global Contact Center (GCC) program.

The authors analyze Hilti’s GCC program based on first-hand experience. Hilti applied an innovative, wave-like implementation approach that facilitated a fast roll-out, fostered peer-to-peer knowledge transfer, and helped to overcome reluctance to change.

The analysis of Hilti’s approach to its new customer service management reveals a number of simple, yet, critical lessons learned regarding leveraging IT-driven business value through global process transformation.

The case report can help researchers to further theorize about IT-enabled process transformation. The GCC program resulted in significant improvements in the performance and quality of customer service processes and enabled transparent reporting and performance measurement on a global scale.

Overall, the GCC case provides an illustrative example of successful process transformation at the global level that also demonstrates implementation challenges. As such, the case report can help practitioners in planning and executing similar projects toward customer service excellence.

Hilti’s GCC case not only provides fresh insights into a successful process transformation. As it focusses on customer service, it also concerns an application area that has received little in the way of attention from process transformation research.

The purpose of this paper is to address the core concept of docility in Simon’s learning theories and elaborate docility as a missing link in organizational performance structures. In his book, Administrative Behavior, first published in 1947 with three subsequent editions, Herbert A. Simon introduced a new concept to the emerging field of organizational theory, docility.

In Administrative Behavior, Herbert A. Simon introduced to management and organization theorists the concept of docility. Simon adopted the concept and meaning from E.C. Tolman’s (1932) classic work, Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men, and his novel views on learning processes and key concepts like purpose (goals), thought processes (cognitive psychology) and cognitive maps. This paper elaborates on docility mechanisms and the implications for social learning in organizations.

This paper addresses this lacuna in the organizational literature, and the implications for current theories of organizations and organizational learning.

Docility is a tool to link individual learning with organizational learning in complex environments and changing technologies.

The paper traces origins of Simon’s docility and learning theories.

The purpose of this paper is to identify organizational challenges that drive enterprise content management (ECM) adoption from a process point of view.

The presented results are grounded in both the academic literature on ECM and qualitative data from two case studies.

The study identifies and discusses 21 contemporary business challenges that drive ECM adoption along the content lifecycle (e.g. regarding the creation, storage, and retrieval of content).

As the scopes of both the literature review and the case studies were limited, the presented account of ECM drivers is not considered exhaustive. The paper can, nevertheless, help researchers to further theorize about ECM adoption and investigate the role that content plays in business process management.

Practitioners are provided with empirically grounded knowledge on the drivers behind ECM adoption. They can, for example, use the results to justify and evaluate ECM investments, or determine the scopes and objectives of their ECM initiatives.

This study is important because the understanding is still vague as to what organizations strive to gain through implementing ECM and what results they can expect from the same.

In this paper, we seek to understand how changes in product architecture affect the innovation performance of firms in a complex product ecosystem. The canonical view in the literature is that changes in the technological dependencies between components, which define a product’s architecture, undermine the innovation efforts of incumbent firms because their product development efforts are built around existing architectures. We extend this prevailing view in arguing that component dependencies and changes in them affect firm innovation efforts via two principal mechanisms. First, component dependencies expand or constrain the choice set of firm component innovation efforts. From the perspective of any one component in a complex product (which we label the focal component), an increase in the flow of design information to the focal component from other (non-focal) components simultaneously increases the constraint on focal component firms in their choice of profitable R&D projects while decreasing the constraint on non-focal component firms. Second, asymmetries in component dependencies can confer disproportionate influence on some component firms in setting and dictating the trajectory of progress in the overall system. Increases in such asymmetric influence allow component firms to expand their innovation output. Using historical patenting data in the personal computer ecosystem, we develop fine-grained measures of interdependence between component technologies and changes in them over time. We find strong support for the empirical implications of our theory.

The purpose of this paper is to review and analyze the modularity literature to identify the established and emerging perspectives.

A systematic literature search and review was conducted through the use of bibliometrics and network analysis. The analysis identified structure within the literature, which revealed how the research area evolved between 1990 and 2015. Based on this search, the paper establishes the basis for analyzing the structure of modularity literature.

Factors were identified within the literature, demonstrating how it has evolved from a primary focus on the modularity of products to a broader view of the applicability of modularity. Within the last decade, numerous research areas have emerged within the broader area of modularity. Through core-periphery analysis, eight emerging sub-research areas are identified, of which one is the study of modularity in the context of services.

Although bibliographic methods are limited as they are based on common citations within the field, they enable systematic analysis and the identification of structure within an emergent field of research. Such analysis has implications by for a growing and inter-disciplinary field like modularity by providing overview and suggesting future directions.

This paper contributes by conducting a systematic review based on the citation structure within modularity and identifies the established and emerging areas of research on modularity.