The role of content management systems in publishing firms

Abstract

This paper investigates the interaction between technological and organizational parameters. Recent studies have been focused on the information and communication impact on organizational parameters, owing to the growing need to acquire and process information. We focus on the impact of the content management system on publishing firms and through the study of ten Italian cases we identify the socio-technical context which favor the adoption of technology as well as the organizational parameters influenced by the technology use.

Introduction

The reciprocal influence between technological and organizational parameters is a very controversial issue since the Sixties: Leavitt and Whisler (1958) have to be considered the real eye-openers for this topic that was enriched with Simon's studies (1960) who analyzed the impact of computer use on organizations. Right now it is still a topical issue (Martinez, 2004) but the growing need to acquire and process information is influencing the scientific literature: recent studies, in fact, have been focused on the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on organizational parameters (Chu and Smithson, 2007, Clegg et al., 2005, Markus, 2004).

Three major scientific approaches can be identified with regard to the mutual connection between ICTs and governance (Markus & Robey, 1988): a technological, an organizational and an emerging approach. The technological approach emphasizes the ICT effect on job partitioning and the subsequent coordination reaching to the idea of technological determinism: technical facilities and applications almost automatically induce specific governance types. Organizational settings adopted in the real world are results of chosen technologies. They influence personal and group behaviors as well as decisional processes and attainable results. The organizational approach points out how organizational parameters affect the technological development and ICT implementation of the firm. This approach is due to studies based on the information processing view (Daft and Lengel, 1986, Robey, 1977) which derives from classical studies of Woodward (1958), Thompson (1967), Perrow's (1967) and Child (1972). According to this view, managerial choices and social structures define appropriated technologies and technical facilities.

The emerging perspective (Orlikowski, 1992, Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978) chosen by the authors, does not propose a cause and effect influence of technologies on the type of organization nor a dependence of technical choices on managerial structures, but it analyses the practical interaction between available technologies and socio-political characteristics of organizational types. The basic hypothesis of this perspective states that technologies can influence and modify human behavior and, at the same time, people can choose the right way to use technology modifying, reinforcing or cancelling its capacities.

There are a great number of scientific contributions about the impact of technologies on organizational design; this paper is focused on such cases where information is the core business of the firm.²

The study of the ICT impact on firms based on content business is very different from the same on manufacturing or service firms because of the role of information. Usually ICTs streamline and improve the management of customers and suppliers personal data, order fulfillment, accounting and administrative processes and reporting. Main advantages are associated with error reductions, time and speed improvements, information sharing increase and probably efficiency in terms of subordinate processes. However it is clear that these processes do not add value to the product/service performance for the major part of firms and for this reason the study of the ICT role for this kind of firm is interesting but non essential. On the other side, the idea that specific technologies can support content management, product design and development as well as physical production, drives scientific research to a quite new topic: strategic and organizational effects owing to the adoption of specific technologies.

For this reason the main objective of this paper is the analysis of the ICT role in the organization of content firms (see Fig. 1).

This research topic implies a particular choice about the industry: in fact, all information and content firms can be interesting for the study. In particular we could choose different industries among recording firms (Kwok et al., 2004, Sivadas et al., 1998), insurance firms (Milis and Mercken, 2002, Wright and Donaldson, 2002), and banks (Banphot et al., 2008, Pollalis, 2003) we decided to investigate printing and publishing firms. There are many differences among newspapers, magazines and books, but the content management and the new product development have the same importance. The same criterion has been used in choosing the specific technology to be analyzed: we chose particular tools used for content management. With regard to these tools there is not concurrence in the literature about the definition and the specific functionalities (Gilchrist, 2001). It is not clear which contents are managed by this tool, and which are its basic activities, its functionalities, its data capacity and human skills needed. To begin, it can be defined as the totality of strategies, tools, processes and capabilities to manage the firm informative asset (AIS, 2003). In this paper content management systems represent an integrated approach for storing and organizing all kinds of information from notes to data, reports, web contents and digital assets. Specifically the tool used for optimization in data collection, organization, use and updating with regard to information and contents (AIS, 2003). This paper is focused on the ICT role in the firm organization with particular regard to internal parameters selected by literature review. In the following section main scientific contributions are analyzed, then the methodology is explained; major results are discussed and conclusions close the paper.