M. L Markus

Bentley University · Department of Information and Process Management

The forthcoming JAIS special issue on “Envisioning Digital Transformation” is predicated on the assumption that theoretical diversity would be a good thing for the IS field. But making sense of theoretical diversity requires either a common frame of reference or crystal clarity about concept definitions and the phenomena to which they point. In thi...

How can and should the IS field best contribute to the Social Welfare Computing research agenda, which seeks to assess unintended consequences and propose better solutions related to the potential harms of digital business practices? In this discussion paper, we take Amazon.com, Inc. as an instance of a giant digital company and examine it structur...

This chapter represents Markus and Rowe’s (MIS Quarterly, 42(4), 1255–1280, 2018) causal structure framework of ideal-typical positions on three dimensions: Causal Ontology, Causal Trajectory, and Causal Autonomy. The focus of the Causal Ontology dimension is: Does the theorist conceive of causality as existing in the human mind or in reality? The...

Mobile money has been viewed as transformative in developing countries, because it provides basic financial services via mobile phones to people who lack easy access to formal financial services such as bank accounts. Given its accessibility, security, and affordability, mobile money has been increasingly touted as a promising digital solution for...

Digital innovations have the potential to affect, not just their users and the organizations that develop and deploy them, but also society as a whole. However, the attempt to study the connections between digital innovations and societal transformation is fraught with challenges. These challenges include: the diversity of even apparently similar d...

How to theorize the role of information and communication technologies in socioeconomic development remains a pressing concern in the ICT4D community. The plethora of potentially applicable theories calls out for integration, and recent integrative frameworks understandably assign to ICTs a prominent driving role in bringing about development outco...

Inclusive digital innovations are IT-enabled innovations with the potential to promote inclusive socioeconomic development for the poor and underserved inhabitants of developing countries. This paper inquires about the extent to which this worthy objective has actually been achieved. Specifically, the paper focuses on M-Shwari, the Kenyan mobile sa...

Whatever answer one gives to the question "Is information technology changing the world?," the answer contains reasoning about causality. Causal reasoning is central to IS theorizing. This paper focuses on the concept of causal structure, defined by Markus and Robey (1988) as a theorist's assumptions about causal influences in IS phenomena, and pro...

Whatever answer one gives to the question "Is information technology changing the world?" the answer contains reasoning about causality. Causal reasoning is central to IS theorizing. This paper focuses on the concept of causal structure, defined by Markus and Robey (1988) as a theorist's assumptions about causal influences in IS phenomena, and prop...

The dominant design theory posits that widespread innovation adoption, at least for product innovations, happens when a vendor shakeout occurs and subsequently a dominant design of the product emerges. This paper examines how the dominant design theory holds for non-product innovations: could we expect widespread adoption to occur with alternative...

This paper revisits the concept of innovation changes during the implementation process. Prior literature has mostly focused on innovation changes during the adaptation process and organizational-level effects of those changes. However, such a theoretical lens leaves out an important dimension in the magnitude of changes: the potential community-le...

Good business process governance is necessary for the success of business processes, which in turn are essential for business success. The term business process governance refers to the direction, coordination, and control of individuals, groups, or organizations that are at least to some extent autonomous, meaning that hierarchical authority alone...

In their provocative Insights and Perspectives article ‘Is theory king?’, David Avison and Julien Malaurent identified and theorized a problem in our field and proposed a theory of how to solve it. In brief, they argued that (1) overemphasis on theory in leading IS journals has produced qualitative IS research that exhibits negative characteristics...

The ACM Code of Ethics asserts that computing professionals have an ethical responsibility to minimize the negative consequences of information and communication technologies (ICT). Negative consequences are rarely intended, but they can often be foreseen with careful sociotechnical analysis in advance of system building. Motivated by an interest i...

The success of e-government is believed to depend in part on the organizational and institutional arrangements that governments enact for the management of their IT resources. This paper develops the conceptualization of IT management arrangements by considering possible interactions between two dimensions — 1) the organization of IT activities and...

Despite the ubiquitous presence of information technology (IT) in the workplace and the continued computerization of all kinds of work practices, investigations into how IT artifacts play a role in professional identity construction remain rare. Existing studies tend to emphasize sense-making and discourses around IT. This study attempts to fill so...

Design science research (DSR) has staked its rightful ground as an important and legitimate Information Systems (IS) research paradigm. We contend that DSR has yet to attain its full potential impact on the development and use of information systems ...

IT capabilities, including IT governance, are widely believed to affect the value organizations derive from IT. This paper focuses on what may be an important strategy for building enterprise-wide IT capabilities in large decentralized organizations: undertaking an IT centralizing reorganization to concentrate authority for IT activities and decisi...

IT capabilities, including IT governance, are widely believed to affect the value organizations derive from IT. This paper focuses on what may be an important strategy for building enterprise-wide IT capabilities in large decentralized organizations: undertaking an IT centralizing reorganization to concentrate authority for IT activities and decisi...

Business-to-business interactions are increasingly conducted through interorganizational coordination hubs, in which standardized IT-based platforms provide data and business process interoperability for interactions among the organizations in particular industrial communities. Because the governance of interorganizational arrangements is believed...

This paper for the 20th anniversary issue of the Journal of Global Information Management (JGIM) looks back on the last ten years of research on two related areas highlighted in Tan and Gallupe’s (1999) manifesto for research on global information management in the decade ahead: global enterprise management and global management of information re...

Despite evidence that a lack of interoperable information systems results in enormous costs, development, implementation, and effective use of interorganizational systems (IOS) remain an elusive goal for many companies. Lack of interoperability across systems is especially problematic for manufacturers dependent on global supply chains. We develop...

Through this paper we advance an initial set of 12 observations that will form the basis for developing design principles for public safety networks (PSN), and more broadly for inter-organizational systems within the public sector. A public safety network is an interagency collaboration focused on the development and use of information and communic...

Government agencies increasingly enter into interorganizational alliances to accomplish common goals. Alliances to create and maintain shared IT infrastructures for communication, coordination, and collaboration among agencies are an especially important phenomenon. This article examines three perspectives on the governance of interorganizational a...

Development, implementation, and effective use of interorganizational information systems (IOS) remain an elusive goal for many companies, despite growing complexity in supply chains and evidence that lack of interoperable information systems results in enormous costs. We use collective action theory and a pie sharing framework to explore factors i...

Extensive discussions and roundtables done by the panelists with tens ofCIOs in recent years suggest that there is increased CIO concern about the depreciation in the perceived importance of MIS in the industry and a need therefore to adapt the curriculum of MIS and its place in the MBA program to what the industry needs. The panel will discuss thi...

For interorganisational systems to provide benefits to all partner organisations typically requires well designed internal systems and processes and integration between enterprise systems and the IOS. Organisations frequently do not make these investments and the resulting physical implementation details, such as duplicated data storage, manual ree...

Good business process governance is necessary for the success of business processes, which in turn are essential for business success. The term business process governance refers to the direction, coordination, and control of individuals, groups, or organizations that are at least to some extent autonomous: that is, not directly subject to the same...

How and why people use information technology (IT) after initial adoption is a growing area of research in the information systems (IS) field. For the most part, IS scholars have approached this area of study with conceptual tools well honed in the study of initial IT adoption and acceptance – specially, with theories of reasoned action that emphas...

The literature on virtual or online communities contains two largely disjoint bodies of scholarship. One, which we call the “communities” literature, is concerned primarily with the social and psychological processes observable within groups of people that interact regularly in online environments. The other, concerned primarily with the effects of...

This essay reviews the history of information technology (IT) use in large US organizations. The essay begins with a brief historical account of changes in the structure of large US organizations over the last century. This is followed by two short but detailed accounts of IT use in large US organizations during two eras of computing — the mainfram...

One of the most welcome recent developments in Information Systems scholarship has been the growing interest in individuals’ continuing use of information technology well after initial adoption, known in the literature as IT usage, IT continuance, and post-adoptive IT usage. In this essay, we explore the theoretical underpinnings of IS research on...

Gerardine DeSanctis and Marshall Scott Poole made an important contribution to the study of IT uses and effects with their insightful concepts of “structural features” and “spirit.” Unlike their concept of “appropriation,” which has found broad acceptance in the IS community, the concepts of structural features and spirit have not been widely used....

This paper provides an interim report on ongoing data collection and analysis efforts as part of a large-scale study of information technology- focused interagency collaborations in the United States public safety sector---collaborations we refer to as public safety networks (PSNs). Of particular interest are shared infrastructures for supporting t...

This paper reports on an empirical investigation of a particular computerization movement—the diffusion of automated underwriting in the US home mortgage industry—over a twenty-plus year timeframe. Building on and extending seminal work by Kling and Iacono (1988, 1995, 2001), this paper demonstrates the influences of technological action frames, pa...

An important line of research on global information management examines the effects of national culture on IT development, operations, management and use. This paper argues that global information management researchers should not lose sight of structural conditions related to business-to-business and business-to-consumer e-commerce activity. Struc...

This paper presents the results of a qualitative review and synthesis of the literature on open source governance, addressing four key questions: (1) How has open source software (OSS) governance been defined? (2) Has the phenomenon of OSS governance been conceptualized as a monolithic or multidimensional phenomenon? (3) What purposes is OSS govern...

The building of public safety network (PSN) infrastructures for the purposes of facilitating communication, sharing of information, and collaboration among first responders has been identified as a key policy goal in the aftermath of events such as the September 11th terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina. Early analysis of professional and academ...

Vertical information systems standards are designed to promote communication and coordination among the organizations comprising a particular industry sector; these standards may address product identification, data definitions, business document layout, and/or business process sequences. A case study of the emergence of vertical information system...

Electronic marketplaces (EMPs) are widely assumed to increase price transparency and hence lower product prices. Results of empirical studies have been mixed, with several studies showing that product prices have not decreased and others showing that prices have increased in some cases. One explanation is that sellers prefer not to join EMPs with h...

Vertical information systems (VIS) standards are technical specifications designed to promote coordination among the organizations within (or across) vertical industry sectors. Examples include the bar code, electronic data interchange (EDI) standards, and RosettaNet business process standards in the electronics industry. This contribution examines...

Conceptual labels influence researchers’ observations and analytic insights. This article aims to clarify the contributions of standards label by contrasting it with other ways of viewing the same entity and applying it to the IT-enabled supply chain innovation of Collaborative Planning, Forecasting, and Replenishment (CPFR). Proponents have labele...

In this paper, we identify key characteristics of public safety response mobilization systems (PSRMS) and describe the different technical characteristics they can assume: open standards vs. commercial-off-the-shelf packages, fixed vs. mobile, security and privacy management approaches, data distribution and access control. Finally, we present test...

Within Information Systems (IS), as with all other scientific communities, the publication of original research is the primary mode of communication. One characteristic of such communication is the use of references. Yet, scientific communities differ in the ways their members use citations to position their own contribution. In this paper, we exam...

As organizations look for new ways to obtain business value from their investments in enterprise systems, they are naturally seeking to integrate their systems externally with suppliers, customers, and other business partners by implementing what are often called interorganizational systems (IOS). Although many organizations have realized sizable b...

Interorganizational Systems (IOS) can have influences that extend beyond the organiza- tions that implement them. Much can be learned at the industry-level of analysis that might not be revealed in studies conducted at the organizational level of analysis. This article summarizes a case study of one industry - the US home mortgage industry - in ord...

Vertical IS standards prescribe data structures and definitions, document formats, and business processes for particular industries, in contrast to generic information technology (IT) standards, which concern IT characteristics applicable to many industries. This paper explores the potential industry structure effects of vertical information system...

This paper reports on an empirical investigation of a particular computerization movement—the diffusion of automated underwriting in the US home mortgage industry—over a twenty-plus year timeframe. Building on and extending seminal work by Kling and Iacono (1988, 1995, 2001), this paper shows the influences of, and interplays among, technological a...

Recently, Orlikowski and Iacono (2001) called for increased theorizing of the information technology (IT) artifact. Both authors have made important contributions to what they refer to as the “ensemble” view of technology. By contrast, the “tool” view has remained noticeably underdeveloped. The goal of this essay is to begin articulating such a too...

AIS Council monitors social and technical trends that might affect the timeliness and relevance of IS curricula. Consequently, AIS Council charged the AIS VP for Education with developing a process to highlight the importance of these trends and to stimulate the development of education innovations to address them. The result is an AIS-sponsored aw...

What's in a name? In this paper we argue the importance of looking, not just at different definitions of the same concept, but also at different concepts applied to the same phenomenon. Concepts such as "organizing vision", "methodology", "technology artifact", and "standards" represent different ways of understanding IS innovations, each highlight...

Vertical IS standards prescribe data structures and definitions, document formats, and business processes for particular industries, in contrast to horizontal IT standards, which concern IT characteristics applicable to many industries. This paper explores the potential effects of vertical IS standards in the US home mortgage industry by examining...

Interdisciplinary research is often recommended and occasionally studied, but little has been written about the personal, practical, and methodological issues involved in doing it. In this article, the authors describe one particular research collaboration between a business communication scholar and an information systems researcher. They present...

Using IT in ways that can trigger major organizational changes creates high-risk, potentially high-re ward, situations that I call technochange (for technology-driven organizational change). Technochange differs from typical IT projects and from typical organizational change programs and therefore requires a different approach. One major risk in te...

E-commerce strategists advise companies to create virtual communities for their customers. But what does this involve? Research on face-to-face communities identifies the concept of "sense of community:" a characteristic of successful communities distinguished by members' helping behaviors and members' emotional attachment to the community and othe...

In contrast to horizontal IT standards, which concern the characteristics of IT products and apply to users in many industries, vertical IS standards focus on data structures and definitions, document formats, and business processes and address business problems unique to particular industries. This paper contributes to the small but important lite...

In contrast to horizontal IT standards, which concern the characteristics of IT products and apply to users in many industries, vertical IS standards focus on data structures and definitions, document formats, and business processes and address business problems unique to particular industries. This paper contributes to the small but important lite...

The home mortgage industry is highly significant for the US economy in terms of Gross Domestic Product and employment. Despite the fact that mortgage lending is an information-intensive industry, residential mortgage lending has been characterized as traditional and slow to adopt IT. Thus, the potential impacts of e-commerce in this industry are gr...

This book presents a new set of practical and powerful tools to help business get the full benefit from their information technology (IT) investments. It addresses how organizations can work together to improve business performance. It elaborates on the approach for assessing the maturity of IT-business alignment; once maturity is understood, busin...

The IS literature distinguishes between custom-built and off-the-shelf software. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) packages are often viewed as off-the-shelf software, because adopters implement them by setting parameters (called configuration), rather than by traditional programming. Making changes to ERP software code (called modification) is us...

This paper reviews and assesses several theoretical perspectives on one type of business-to-business electronic marketplace---collaboration marketplaces. Whereas transaction-oriented marketplaces are characterized by catalogs, auctions or exchanges, and support for negotiated pricing, collaboration marketplaces are characterized by planning capabil...

This paper reviews and assesses several theoretical perspectives on one type of business-to-business electronic marketplace—collaboration marketplaces. Whereas transaction-oriented marketplaces are characterized by catalogs, auctions or exchanges, and support for negotiated pricing, collaboration marketplaces are characterized by planning capabilit...

An important line of research on global information management examines the effects of national culture on information technology (IT) development, operations, management, and use. This chapter argues that global information management researchers should not lose sight of structural conditions related to business-to-business and business-to-consume...

An important line of research on global information management examines the effects of national culture on information technology (IT) development, operations, management, and use. This chapter argues that global information management researchers should not lose sight of structural conditions related to business-to-business and business-to-consume...

E-commerce strategists advise companies to create virtual communities for their customers. But what is involved in establishing and maintaining virtual communities? This paper addresses two questions: Does a sense of community similar to that sometimes observed in physical communities also occur in virtual settings? And how is a sense of virtual co...

This paper addresses the design problem of providing IT support for emerging knowledge processes (EKPs). EKPs are organizational activity patterns that exhibit three characteristics in combination: an emergent process of deliberations with no best structure or sequence; requirements for knowledge that are complex (both general and situational), dis...

What do IT and business executives need to do about enterprise systems in the years ahead? This paper reports the findings of an 18-month study, sponsored by the Advanced Practices Council of the Society for Information Management (SIM) International. The study addressed systems integration issues with both an internal and an external focus, but th...

E-commerce strategists advise companies to create virtual communities for their customers, but what is involved in establishing and maintaining virtual communities? This paper addresses two questions: does a sense of community similar to that sometimes observed in physical communities also occur in virtual settings, and how is a sense of virtual co...

An important line of research on global information management examines the effects of national culture on IT development, operations, management and use. This paper argues that global information management researchers should not lose sight of structural conditions related to business-to-business and business-to-consumer e-commerce activity. Struc...

INEEC05Electronic marketplaces are important because of their potential to change industry structure, for example, by eliminating or altering the role of traditional intermediaries, leading to consolidation of fragmented industries or fragmentation of consolidated ones. Not solely a western phenomenon, there has been considerable electronic marketp...

An important line of research on global information management examines the effects of national culture on IT development, operations, management and use. This paper argues that global information management researchers should not lose sight of structural conditions related to business-to-business and business-to-consumer e-commerce activity. Struc...

A debate at ICIS 2000 asked whether the trend toward e-business calls for changes in the fundamental concepts of information systems. This article summarizes viewpoints presented in the debate. It also presents audience feedback in the form of a vote about whether new concepts are needed and selected comments submitted by the audience about key iss...

This paper represents a step toward a theory of knowledge reusability, with emphasis on knowledge ma nagement systems and repositories, often called organizational memory systems. Synthesis of evidence from a wide variety of sources suggests four distinct types of knowledge reuse situations according to the knowledge reuser and the purpose of knowl...

The IS literature distinguishes between custom-built and off-the-shelf software. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) packages are often viewed as off-the-shelf software, because adopters implement them by setting parameters (called configuration), rather traditional programming. Making changes to ERP software code (called modification) is usually st...