Changing Institutionalized Practices When Implementing a Mandated Technology

In knowledge intensive organizations—such as Information Technology (IT) companies or consultancy firms—knowledge sharing processes and collaboration represent key success factors for competing in a dynamic business environment. In small firms knowledge sharing and collaboration are facilitated by the physical proximity of the R&D or business development specialists. In large organizations, characterized by distributed settings, to speed up innovation and time-to-market, managers need to find ways to enable knowledge sharing and collaboration among individuals and teams located in different geographical areas. Managers have a choice of different strategies and IT tools to support employee collaboration. Through the institutional theory lens, the objective of this research is to better understand the challenges of selecting and using collaborative IT tools in a geographically distributed setting. To this end, we have collected data via a case study of a large IT organization that introduced a centralized mandated IT tool aimed at enabling collaboration among employees working in a distributed setting and belonging to different departments and functions. Our preliminary findings show that institutionalized practices, organizational silos as well as lack of time and incentives compromised the effective use of the mandated IT tool.