Information technology in practice of organising : meeting fragmentation and interdependence by the incremental political delivery of information systems in financial services

The thesis explores business issues of strategic alignment, productivity and discontinuity of information technology in financial services. Managers meet these issues with simple rules, like 80-20 rule, no key-man dependence, and process orientation. The thesis discovers how simple decision premises enhanced by politics and incremental methodology are tools for managing the scale-free co-evolutionary change of information technology and people in organisational contexts. In doing so, the thesis develops and tests a research design integrating the models of interdependence, power and incrementalism. There are seven chapters to the thesis. Following the identification of the major issues in the introduction, chapter 1 operates with a probability-based approach to power and develops applications of power patterns in process management within the framework of ‘the Pareto Dynamics of Strategic Adaptation’. An initial description of the behaviour of highly interdependent socio-technical systems is provided in chapter 2, particularly such systems allow no independent variables consuming resources. Chapter 3 outlines the research methodology and establishes epistemological bases by presenting some useful presuppositions and ways of description from multiple positions and on multiple levels. The empirical analysis is presented in chapters 4, 5 and 6. Chapter 4 explores how the several stable shared simple decision premises make the emergent complex of software, people and institutions aligning to authority and cause-effect rationality. The construction of technologies for coordination purposes is investigated in chapter 5. Chapter 6 reviews the practices of IT support, training, resource allocation, evaluation and management and identifies further detail on incremental change managing and balancing on the edge of scarcity of the information technology resources. Chapter 7 concludes with ‘thinking directions’ that show how others can use the research. For researchers, there are ways of configuring organisational analysis with concepts from complexity and economic thinking in a qualitative design. And for practitioners, there are recommendations on the use of ‘incrementalism’ and ‘practice lens’. On the whole, the situation of constraining and functionally overload software studied indicates that IT runs well in advance of our cognitive and relational competencies. Therefore, the thesis concludes that a stronger cognitive perspective upon strategic alignment is needed.