Small Business Growth and Internal Transparency: The Role of Information Systems

Abstract

While many large businesses start out as a small enterprise, remarkably little is known about how an organization actually changes internally during the periods of growth. Small business growth is known to strain internal communication processes, for example, which likely limits growth opportunities. Information systems are often called upon to remedy such deficiencies. Through a participatory action research project, we investigated the ways in which a small business management 1 Michael Myers was the accepting senior editor for this paper. team developed an IS-enabled solution to address their growth needs. During the progression of the project, a new outcome of organizational effectiveness, internal transparency, was identified and developed. Adopting a punctuated equilibrium perspective, a theoretical process model is proposed that sheds light on a relationship between internal transparency, small business growth, and IS. The paper concludes with observations that internal transparency may well be a concept that offers significant potential for MIS research as well as a discussion about the applicability and credibility of participatory action research for this project.

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Les systèmes d’information en microfirme

“…Une littérature abondante a étudié le rôle stratégique des SI dans les petites entreprises : l'alignement entre la stratégie d'entreprise et la technologie implémentée (Blili et Raymond, 1993 ;Levy et Powell, 2000 ;Levy, Powell et Yetton, 2001 ;Levy, Powell et Yetton, 2002) ; l'impact des SI sur la performance (Cragg et King, 1992 ;Francalanci et Morabito, 2008), l'amélioration de la réactivité et de l'agilité face à un environnement versatile (Amabile, Gadille et Meissonier, 2000) ; l'avantage concurrentiel procuré par un SI en tant que ressource stratégique (Duhan, Levy et Powell, 2001 ;Vacher, 2003 ;Caldeira et Ward, 2003 ;Winter, Gaglio et Rajagopalan, 2009) ; la gestion des risques liés aux SI (Poba-Nzaou et Raymond, 2011) ; ou encore les SI et la croissance de l'entreprise (Street et Meister, 2004 ;Qureshil, Kamal et Wolcott, 2009). …”

Transport Coopetition for Environmental Sustainability: Guiding Vertical Standard Design

“…They vary across dimensions such as process model, structure, typical involvement, and primary goals [4]. Adopting different methodologies, most extant studies follow a social science tradition in that intervention is intended to gain insight into situated social phenomena (e.g., [24,28]). In recent years, however, IS researchers have started to explore crossfertilization possibilities between action research and design research to leverage theory generation and researcher intervention for solving immediate organizational problems [7].…”