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When the river leaves its bed: analyzing deviations between planned and actual interaction structures in IT change processes

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Journal of Information Technology

Abstract

There is ample evidence of deviations between the actual and planned interaction structures between a firm’s IT department and business units. Such deviations can hinder senior managers from governing their IT organizations effectively because they do not know how work really gets done. This paper develops an explanation for why actual structures differ from planned structures. Understanding this phenomenon is indispensable for managers to govern the real organization, to uphold compliance with important standards (e.g., ITIL, COBIT), to decide whether the formal or the actual organization is more effective, and, finally, to identify management actions that support the optimal structure. To develop this understanding, we analyze the interaction structures at the interface between firms’ business units and IT units in four rich cases, using data from 56 interviews and 47 questionnaires, and applying qualitative methods and social network analysis, which give us deep insights into planned and actual interaction among employees. We test two different explanations for deviations of actual from planned interaction structures and find that boundary-spanning theory provides the dominant explanation for such deviations: Inclined to span the business/IT boundary most effectively, the actors involved deviate from planned structures especially when other structures offer better boundary-spanning potential, which is influenced primarily by cross-domain knowledge. In addition, relationships also play an important role. On the positive side, relationships provide opportunities for such deviations, while on the negative side, a conflict-laden relationship might hinder deviations even if they were advantageous.

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Notes

  1. IT Infrastructure Library (OGC, 2007).

  2. Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (ISACA, 2012).

  3. In the IT domain, an analogous trend can be seen in the increasing presence of shadow IT (Williams, 2011), which is caused to a substantial degree by the need for higher agility of business units and appears – to a sometimes threatening degree – despite higher levels of formal transparency and compliance.

  4. The IT organization is generally not strongly influenced by industry specifics (Tiwana and Konsynski, 2010), and for the IT change process, ITIL v3 proposes a ‘guidance that is scalable for different kinds and sizes of organizations’ (OGC, 2007: 42).

  5. More details about the approach are provided in Appendix C.

  6. See Appendix D for details regarding the calculation of betweenness centrality and the determination of a comparable evaluation of the planned structure.

  7. Since the majority of interviews was conducted in German, quotes from these interviews were translated by the first author and translations were verified by the second author.

  8. Non-translated statement from interview conducted in English.

  9. We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for the valuable advice to consider the findings of Nonaka (1994) to explain the importance of cross-domain knowledge and to better understand the creation of organizational knowledge in our context.

  10. Note that in the case of ThatBank we conducted additional interviews for the incident management process and our observations strongly support this theoretical transfer of arguments.

  11. 11. Depending on the organizational setup.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany

    Katja Zolper, Daniel Beimborn & Tim Weitzel

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  1. Katja Zolper
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Appendices

Appendix A

Questionnaire about actual interaction structures

1. Please indicate employees from the business unit with whom you interact a lot in the context of the IT change process for System XY and describe how and how often you interact with them.

illustration

figure a

2. Please indicate employees from the IT unit with whom you interact a lot in the context of the IT change process for System XY and describe how and how often you interact with them.

<answered within the same type of table as question 1>

3. Please indicate employees from the liaison unit with whom you interact a lot in the context of the IT change process for System XY and describe how and how often you interact with them.

<answered within the same type of table as question 1>

Appendix B

Guiding questions for main stage interviews

  • Background of interviewee:

    • ° What is your background?

    • ° Do you have cross-domain experience?

    • ° What is your role in the IT change process?

  • Change process (preferably with regard to a particular example):

    • ° How are (critical) changes handled? Especially, regarding the interaction of involved units?

    • ° How are regular changes handled?

    • ° Is that – in the eyes of the interviewee – congruent with the formal definition of this process?

    • ° If it is only congruent in the eyes of the interviewee but not in the eyes of the interviewer: Interviewer should highlight elements that are different and the interviewee should comment on them.

    • ° If the actual and the process perceived by the interviewee differ: Why the interviewee does not follow the prescribed process? How does this deviation help? (Applying laddering as described in the data collection section and Appendix C).

    • ° What is the key success factor of the actual interaction structure (no matter whether or not it mirrored the planned interaction structure)?

    • ° What would the interviewee change in the interaction structure if he or she could? How would he or she develop interaction structure on a green field? Why?

Appendix C

Using critical incident technique and laddering

Motivated by the fact that critical incidents can be more accurately recalled and described than average behavior (Flanagan, 1954) and significantly impact the success of the process being studied (Bycio and Allen, 2004), we asked interviewees to describe a recent change that was either handled very positively or very negatively, identifying critical incidents. Focusing on such critical situations, we asked the interviewees for factors that were most important for the eventual deviation of actual from planned interaction structures in these situations and applied the interviewing technique used in laddering to understand the connection between this aspect and the potential deviation of interaction structures in more detail. This technique allowed us to investigate answers more systematically (Rugg and McGeorge, 1995). Questions like: ‘Why didn’t you follow the planned interaction structures?’ or ‘Why in particular did this aspect influence your choice of interaction?’ were used to probe upward, respectively, downward the ‘ladder’ of means (drivers) that lead to certain ends (deviation of actual interaction structures) (Reynolds and Gutman, 1988; Rugg and McGeorge, 1995). We also asked the interviewees to describe the regular IT change process, that is, the one they actually followed for regular changes, and compared it with the planned one in a similar fashion.

Appendix D

Calculation of deviation measure

The betweenness of a group, such as a liaison unit, is calculated as the percentage of shortest paths between non-group members of which group members are part (Everett and Borgatti, 1999). Using the survey data, we derived a communication network covering involved people in the business unit, IT unit, and liaison unit. In this network, a tie between two actors means they interact at least once per week in meetings or via phone. Since we are only interested in communication between business and IT (i.e., not the shortest paths within the business unit or within the IT unit), we developed an adapted measure based on the group betweenness measure proposed by Everett and Borgatti (1999):

  • Calculation of shortest paths lengths between any pair of business and IT actors;

  • Elimination of all liaison actors;

  • Recalculation of shortest paths lengths;

  • Count of pairs of actors between which the second length is longer or who have become disconnected when eliminating the liaison actors, that is, the pairs of actors whose shortest paths involve at least one liaison person, making the liaison person part of the most probable path along which business and IT exchange information;

  • Division by the sum of connected pairs in the original network (before the elimination).

The betweenness centrality value for the planned structure was determined as follows:

  • 100% when the liaison person or unit was supposed to fully channel communication;

  • 0% when trilateral meetings were an integral part of interaction structures;

  • 50% when the liaison unit or person should be the primary contact, yet trilateral meetings or clarifying meetings without the liaison unit or person were part of the planned structure.

This approach led to the deviation values shown in Table D1.

Table D1 Calculation of deviation
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Zolper, K., Beimborn, D. & Weitzel, T. When the river leaves its bed: analyzing deviations between planned and actual interaction structures in IT change processes. J Inf Technol 28, 333–353 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2013.23

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