Understanding Coordination in the Information Systems Domain: Conceptualization and Implications

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a new conceptualization of coordination in the Information Systems (IS) domain. The conceptualization is based on neurobiological predispositions for coordinating actions. We assume that human evolution has led to the development of a neurobiological substrate enabling coordination of everyday actions. A discussion of six activity modalities (contextualization, objectivation, spatialization, temporalization, stabilization, and transition) constitutes the core of this article. Specifically, we discuss that collective functioning of these modalities is essential for successful coordination. This finding is illustrated based on application of our conceptualization in important IS research areas, including project management and interface design. Generally, our new conceptualization holds value for coordination research on all four levels of analysis which we identified based on a review of the IS literature (i.e., group, intra-organization, inter-organization, and IT artifact). In this way, our new approach, grounded in neurobiological findings, provides a high-level theory to explain coordination success, or coordination failure, and hence is independent from a specific level of analysis. From a practitioner’s perspective, the conceptualization provides a guideline for the design of organizational interventions and IT artifacts. Since social initiatives are essential in multiple IS domains (e.g., software development, implementation of enterprise systems), and because the design of collaborative software tools is an important IS topic, this paper contributes to a fundamental phenomenon in the IS domain, and does so from a new conceptual perspective