Doing IT Better: An Organization Design Perspective

While the literature is replete with theories and explanations on the organizational value of IT, there are, to the authors' knowledge, few systemic accounts that would help structure the variety of observations, perspectives and paradigms. The purpose of this conceptual paper is to provide a starting point for metatheoretical inquiry in the field. To this end, they draw from well-grounded theories in sociological analysis and organization design to construct a tripartite framework of metaphysical "IT realms" that are also vertically contextualizable with the organizational structure: Technical Realm is reductionist in nature and aimed at efficiency and reliability. They view that contemporary information systems research calls for more sophisticated assumptions on the nature of the social world and on the way in which it may be investigated. On the other hand, they posit that the ontological underpinnings of IT and the organization should be isomorphic.