Structurational analysis of IT-enabled organizational change: a case of public organization in singapore

The implementation of Information Technology (IT) is always associated with a series of complex organizational change issues. For this reason, the literature on IT-enabled organizational change is growing large and spans across management science, organizational development, and Information Systems (IS) research. Despite the handful of research in IT-enabled organizational change, the change initiative projects continue to fail. There are two particular issues arise from such problems, which are conflicting results due to the differential of theoretical model’s structure and the difficulty of contemporary IT-enabled organizational change literature in informing the dynamic environment and customizable technology issues. For this purpose, this research aims to understand the reciprocal relationships between technology and organization by adopting structuration theory. This research proposes the extension of Orlikowski’s (1992) structuration model of technology by separating the institutional properties into environmental structural properties and organizational structural properties. An interpretive case study was conducted on one IT project at public organization in Singapore. The application of structuration theory facilitated understanding the structuration factors and process in IT-enabled organizational change. In addition, the distinct separation of institutional properties enables us to understand reciprocal relationship amongst influencing types of institutional properties, technology, and human. As well, it shows the importance of environmental influence in ITenabled organizational change. The findings and the implications of this research are discussed.