skip to main content
10.1145/1235000.1235014acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagescprConference Proceedingsconference-collections
Article

Research in progress: where are all the people? the curious case of one-person IT departments

Published:19 April 2007Publication History

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we present a research-in-progress study that examines the characteristics of IT-departments that consist of a single employee. Spurred by the findings of a master's student project, we examined the data from another study we had conducted that revealed that fully 44% of municipalities in a Scandinavian country have such one-person-departments. Our survey also revealed that these "departments" provide full service to the municipalities which are quite heavy users of IT services. The obvious question is "how is it possible for the apparently skeletal IT department to provide full service?" Have we stumbled upon a new form of organizing the IT function? In this paper, we aim to map such departments to the models and frameworks that appear in the IS literature. We plan to conduct a series of interpretive case studies to understand how and why this structure emerged and what implications this has for IT personnel employed in these departments and the IT service delivery for organizations.

References

  1. Agarwal, R. and Sambamurthy, V. .Principles and models for organizing the it function, MIS Quarterly Executive, 1, 1 (2002), 1--16.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  2. Agarwal, R. and Ferratt, T.W. Crafting an HR strategy to meet the need for IT workers, Communications of the ACM, 44, 7 (2001), 58--64. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  3. Boyne, G.A. Public and private management: what's the difference?, Journal of Management Studies, 39, 1 (2002), 98--122.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  4. Brown, C.V. and Sambamurthy, V., Re-Positioning the IT Organization to Facilitate Business Transformations, Pinnaflex Press, 1999.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  5. Dearden, J. The withering of the IS department, Sloan Management Review, (Summer, 1987), 87--91.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  6. Elam, J.J., Ginzberg M.J., Keen, P.G.W. and Zmud, R.W. Transforming the IS Organization: The Mission, The Framework, The Transition, ICIT Press, 1998.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  7. Enns, H.G., Ferratt, T.W., and Prasad, J. Antecedents and consequences of traditional and virtual IT professionals' satisfaction with employment arrangements", Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGCPR Conference, Kristiansand, Norway, 2002, 111--119. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  8. Fitzgerald, E.P., and Carter-Steel, A. Champagne training on a beer budget. Communications of the ACM, 38, 1 (1995), 49--60. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  9. Hellang, O, Lindblom, E., Moe, C.E. and Sein, M.K. e-Government and municipal organizational change, Proceedings of NOKOBIT-2006, Molde, Norway, 2006.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  10. Kaarst-Brown, M.L. and Guzman, I. Who is the IT workforce?: challenges facing policy makers, educators, management and research, Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGMIS CPR Conference, Atlanta, GA, 2005, 1--8. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  11. King, J. Ryder trucks out entire is operation, Computerworld (February 9, 1998).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  12. Niederman, F. and Hu, X. Electronic commerce personnel in the age of clicks and mortar: toward a framework of individual and project level skills, Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGMIS CPR Conference, Philadelphia, PA, 2003, 104--110. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  13. Nilsen, H. and Sein, M. K. What is really important in supporting end-users? Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGMIS CPR Conference, Tucson, AZ, 2004, 48--54. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  14. Orlikowski, W. and Baroudi, J.J. The information systems profession: myth or reality? Office Technology and People, 4 (1989), 13--30.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  15. Rocheleau, B and Wu, L. Public versus private information systems: do they differ in important ways? a review and empirical test, American Review of Public Administration, 32, 4 (2002), 379--397.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  16. Sambamurthy, V. and Zmud, R.W. The organizing logic of it activities in the digital era: a prognosis of practice and a call for research, Information Systems Research, (2000), 105--114. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  17. Sambamurthy, V. and Zmud, R.W. Factors influencing information technology management architectures in organizations: a theory of multiple contingencies, MIS Quarterly, 23,2 (1999), 261--290. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  18. Walsham, G. The emergence of interpretivism in IS research. Information Systems Research, 4, 4 (1996) 376--394.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  19. Zmud, R.W. Design alternatives for organizing information systems activities, MIS Quarterly, 8, 2 (1984), 79--93.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library

Index Terms

  1. Research in progress: where are all the people? the curious case of one-person IT departments

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Login options

    Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

    Sign in
    • Published in

      cover image ACM Conferences
      SIGMIS CPR '07: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGMIS CPR conference on Computer personnel research: The global information technology workforce
      April 2007
      246 pages
      ISBN:9781595936417
      DOI:10.1145/1235000

      Copyright © 2007 ACM

      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 19 April 2007

      Permissions

      Request permissions about this article.

      Request Permissions

      Check for updates

      Qualifiers

      • Article

      Acceptance Rates

      Overall Acceptance Rate300of480submissions,63%
    • Article Metrics

      • Downloads (Last 12 months)0
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

      Other Metrics

    PDF Format

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader