Champions are commonly suggested as a means of promoting the adoption of information systems. Since there are many different definitions of the concepts of champion and champion behaviour in the literature, practitioners and researchers may be confused about how to exactly use these concepts. A qualitative analysis of a single case study in a Swedish health-care organisation enabled us to explain how different champion behaviours relate to each other and how multiple champions interact. Combining our rich case observations with an analysis of champion literature reveals how champion behaviours form a coherent and meaningful whole in which networks of different types of champions at different levels in an organisation utilise their network of relations, their knowledge of the organisation and their insight into strategic decisionmaking politics to time and orchestrate the framing of innovations and the involvement of the right people. In conclusion, championing is a complex performance of contextually dependent collective social interaction, varying over time, rather than a heroic act of one individual promoting an idea. Future studies need to focus more on how the relations between different champions and their behaviours develop across innovations and over time, in order to develop a richer understanding of championing.
In a traditional Business Intelligence (BI) system, power users serve less experienced casual users. Power users analyze and gather data requested by casual users, and produce the reports and visualizations that casual users base their decisions on. When data volumes and the usage frequency of a traditional BI system increase, power users have problems serving all the requests from casual users. The Self Service Business Intelligence (SSBI) approach can enable users to be more self-reliant and less dependent on power users. Although SSBI promises more benefits compared to a traditional BI system, many organizations fail to implement SSBI. The literature review presented in this paper discusses six SSBI challenges related to "Access and use of data" and four challenges related to "Self-reliant users". Awareness of these ten challenges can help practitioners avoid common pitfalls, when implementing SSBI, as well as guide SSBI researchers in focusing on their future research efforts.
The results of a 6‐year action research study on developing crisis management preparedness in Swedish municipalities reveal strong connections rather than sharp distinctions between crisis and non‐crisis on interpretive, temporal and organizational dimensions. Confusion and debate about what is labelled as a crisis, when everyday ends and crisis begins, and who and who are not involved, may illuminate different views on what the scale, scope and inherent complexity of ‘our’ system is in crisis and in non‐crisis. Crises are not only a brutal audit for the practitioners involved, but also for the scientific theories that explain crisis behaviour. Current definitions of crisis understate the subjective nature of interpretations of crisis and organizing. To better understand the muddiness of organizing, crisis management researchers might aim for portraying more feed‐forward messiness in crisis study descriptions and applying less hindsight bias in their analyses. Such images could help practitioners realize that organizing is more complex and less controllable than currently might be pictured and assumed. A deeper exploration of concepts like duality, competing values and complex adaptive systems could serve both practitioners and researchers.
This study illustrates how crisis management capability is developed in series of recurring exercises, rather than in one single exercise. Over one hundred table-top and role-playing exercises were performed and evaluated in a longitudinal cross-case action research study in 12 Swedish municipalities. By consciously adapting training formats, municipalities were lead through three learning phases: obtaining role understanding (phase 1: knowing what to do), developing information management skills (phase 2: knowing how to do it), and mastering self-reflection in regular timeouts (phase 3: knowing when and why to do something). This final learning outcome, being able to concurrently execute, evaluate, and reorganize an ongoing crisis management performance, may be the most valuable capability of a crisis management organization when crisis strikes.
K E Y W O R D Scrisis management,
Self-service Business Intelligence (SSBI) allows non-technical users to use Business Intelligence in a selfreliant manner without the support of technical users. Many organizations struggle to utilize the potential of SSBI and experience implementation challenges. This study aims to explore user-related SSBI challenges by conducting 30 qualitative interviews with 2 SSBI implementation projects. Analysis revealed challenges that can help practitioners to avoid unnecessary obstacles when implementing and using SSBI, and guide researchers in simplifying the implementation process.
The 32 autonomous neighbourhood teams of the Amsterdam Police Force need to utilise each other's knowledge and expertise to deal with the variety and complexity of their daily work assignments. However, despite the creation of organisation wide knowledge networks, communication, co-ordination and knowledge sharing between the neighbourhood teams is disappointing. We conducted an action research to investigate how co-ordination in the knowledge networks could be improved with the help of information and communication technologies (ICTs). This article reflects on the choice of co-ordination perspectives and modelling techniques. The above problem is conceptualised and made operational in different ways in research on network co-ordination, knowledge co-ordination and co-ordination of distributed work. The article demonstrates how our initial focus on capturing quantitative measures of the co-ordination problem in a computer simulation was problematic in this case. Instead a social simulation-game that focused on the qualitative issues of this co-ordination problem was developed and played. We conclude that the choice of theoretical perspectives and modelling techniques strongly affected the results of both phases of our action research. Furthermore the article argues that more attention to qualitative issues in co-ordination is required to better understand the impact of ICT-support on co-ordination.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.