When Systems Lose Their Identity

This paper reports a longitudinal study of the design and implementation of a Web-based groupware application. We studied the development of three versions of the application, and the preliminary discussions of the forth. We adopt a sensemaking perspective to analyze the dynamics of this process and show that improvisational action and bricolage (make do with the materials at hand) played a vital role in the development process, successfully within a small group of people, but less so when more, distributed people became involved. The paper introduces the problem of distributed sensemaking in IS development