How is Information Systems Management accomplished when cultural change of an organisation is attempted and, what does this accomplishment mean for those touched by it?
Efforts of this kind are being made in the UK National Health Servise (NHS), where modernisation programmes involving technological rationalisation and change are aiming to make the NHS more reponsive to contemporary public demands. The largest and most appraised of English services, the London Ambulance Service (LAS) is a good specific example, with a history of information systems implementation efforts over 20 years. 
A perceived need for cultural change involving the use of advanced information technologies is pervasive in managerial and ministerial discourses about modernising the health servise, yet the way that ambulance services are regulated and monitored has given rise to a modernisation programme in which cultural change and ISM have been conveived largely instrumentally in terms of achieving performance targets. Moreover, goals to which the modernisation efforts aspire are at most partially realised. Organisational change is uneven, and the performance improvements achieved are contradictory, and this is not only true in London but elsewhere in the UK.
Drawing from organisational theory and critical social theory, past Information Systems implementation efforts at the LAS can be reinterpreted in light of recent developments, with contributions to theory and practice in mind. The theoretical contribution rests in exploring how emotion as well as rationality may be conceptualised to examine historically and culturally constituted working practices. Implications for practice address how ISM can give rise to cultural fragmentation, and also how professional identity can constrain information systems innovation.
We need to focus on the nature and development of organisational culture research without very specific reference to the broad range of practices and symbols in organisations that were addressed by the studies. Also, we need to be able to take a cultural perspective to study IS development, management, and use in organisations, and also to study high technology corporations and software consultancies as organisational cultures based around ISM, rather than the other way around.
Summary / conclusions needed
7 April 2008 at 3:28 pm
This is an interesting comment on the heavy dose of culture in any ISM system. I wonder if the NHS has done an network mapping or analysis in order to best manage the cultural chages? In particular, it’s pretty well uderstood that a formal system will only really be properly used and bring advantage if it complements existing informal systems. I figure with something like the ambulance service, it would be relatively straightforward to look at human interaction patters, because they’ll likely be based mostly on people’s actual physical access to one another.
The other thing that would be interesting to follow is how this system is being affected by mobile devices, and whether there’s a high amount of communication happening through texting and mobile phones rather than the official radio channels…