The Coevolution of Routines and IT Systems in IT-enabled Organizational Transformation as an Instance of Digital Transformation: A Social Constructivist Perspective

This paper proposes a conceptual framework to study the phenomenon of IT-enabled Organizational Transformation (IT-enabled OT) as a coevolution process of organizational routines and a new IT system. The framework’s objective is to understand IT-enabled OT in a holistic and integrated manner by investigating how actors perceive, interpret, appropriate, and enact, the new IT system in their work routines as well as how they align the new system and these routines with the social order and structures of the organization. It allows the examination of the reciprocal interactions between different aspects of organizational routines and a new IT system to enhance the understanding of how change unfolds in an organization during the implementation, the adoption, use, and adaptation of a new IT system. We illustrate the scope, the analytic and conceptual strength of the framework with a number of examples from the literature and, lastly, discuss its ontological positioning. The paper concludes with a call for further research to empirically validate and refine the proposed framework.