The Role of the Preliminary Banski Study

Prior to my main study at iSource, I conducted a 7 month pilot study of ESN adoption at the B2B sales division (Banksi) of one of the UKs oldest and established banking and financial services institutions. Banksi was widely recognized as one of the largest payment providers in the world, with over 10, 000 employees in 50 countries serving approximately 35 million customers worldwide. As its payment processing business grew to become more diversified, its operations also became marked by varying and often conflicting interests across supporting risk management, human resources and internal communications departments, and core service lines like consumer credit card lending, corporate charge and credit issuing, retail merchant payment processing. Additionally, each of these functional units had necessarily distinct sales strategy, product development and front- line sale departments (account development, telephony and mobiles).

This organisational pluralism became especially evident and salient when a number of Banksi’s departments decided to initiate a number of different grass roots ESN projects from 2008 to 2012. During this period, different Banksi departments appropriated ESN to improve collaboration and job satisfaction following the subprime mortgage crisis in 2007, improve information management and sharing following unexpected and significant customer growth 2011, and support behavioural change and engagement after the inter-bank exchange rate (libor) fraud in 2012. I visited Banksi on average of 3 times per week staying 5 hours per day from November 2012 to April 2013. During my 6 or so months at Banksi I divided my time between following 13 in-office account development and telephony staff from two company locations, mobile sales staff, sales effectiveness team meetings and weekly

office meetings. I spent an average of 5 hours per day observing in- office staff and shadowed mobile staff for an average of 3 days.

During this time, I used ethnographic shadowing techniques to understand how mobile sales staff collaborated using ESN tools. I also conducted 41 scheduled interviews over 2 phases, during November 2012 to December 2013 and February 2013 to April 2013. My interview protocol was focused on understanding the teams (structure, practices, rituals, heritage), individual motivations for using ESN, how they used ESN, and significant events and engagement strategies. I supplemented observations and interviews with 39 company documents relating to the company history, business and technology strategy, work practices and policies, collaboration, and social media and ESN use. I coded this data in three relatively open and iterative stages according to the prescriptions of grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; C. Oliver, 2011), and the modified content analysis employed in Berg’s (2001) study of how different notions of “success” and “failure” hampered the implementation of a hospital patient care information systems. Using this as a guide I looked for broader theorizations for driving change with ESN and the institutional vocabularies and non-linguistic actions surrounding distinct theorizations.

My initial analysis indicated that Banksi’s adoption of ESN was significantly shaped by historical political, cultural, economic and technological institutional pressures that I coded as distinct market, community and professional logics. Along these lines, Banksi’s culture of distinctly different objectives and working practices significantly influenced the ESN motivation, objectives and adoption strategies of actors in different functional units. While this competition proved to be an impediment for much of their journey, I found that actors with competing market and community ESN interests were able to make collective sense of ESN when its features and ethos were focused on reinforcing the aims and means of professional logics. Further analysis into how this collective ESN design emerged revealed that institutional entrepreneurs were fostered collective meaning making and engagement by applying

pragmatic confirmation, selection, and advertising strategies. These results were presented in the institutional logics, IT adoption and technology strategy tracks of several conferences spanning 2013- 2014, most notably at the International Conference on Information Systems 2013 in a paper titled

“Legitimating User Participation in Mature Organisations: Exploring Social Media Adoption in a Financial Services Organisation” (see Ramotar and Baptista, (2013)).

After critical discussion of these findings, I concluded that the institutional logics and legitimacy lens were epistemologically and ontologically compatible (and thus, methodologically), and were ideally suited for conceptualizing the technological and organisational interest and value gaps, and implementation strategies that emerge during IT adoption. Accordingly, the first phase of data collection at iSource was conducted with this conceptualization and positioning in mind. However, these discussions also revealed that my attempt to position these findings in the IT adoption and technology strategy literature was too broad. The idea of mobilizing legitimation strategies to address legitimacy gaps lead to me to consider the cultural fit and alignment literature. At this point my advisor also suggested that computerization movements literature would be a good way to conceptualize how competing actors attempted to legitimate ESN use in different ways. After testing the suitability of these bodies of literature with two extended abstract workshops I found that that my initial work could make the biggest contribution to the diffusion literature. My advisors and other professors showed a lot of interest in my idea to position IT legitimation as a novel concept of internal IT diffusion.

Specifically, my review of this literature yielded a number of a number of gaps in terms of how new artefacts and practices can be proactively aligned with pre- existing organisational structures as they are translated into front- line practices (Ansari, Fiss and Zajac, 2010; Reay et al., 2013; Nielsen, Mathiassen and Newell, 2014). Further exploration of this avenue revealed a wealth of methodological research into the rhetorical legitimation and rhetorical diffusion of new ideas and artefacts, which were well aligned to my initial conceptualization of institutional IT legitimation (Suddaby and Greenwood,

2005; Green, 2004; Harmon, Green and Goodnight, 2014). Accordingly, I collected and analyzed the rest of my data at iSource with this new rhetorical legitimation lens in mind.