Cross-Boundary Information Systems Development: A Practice Theory Based View

Growth of consumer-faced information systems (IS) applications shifts IS designers from seeing their work as “capturing and automating requirements” to seeing it as “innovation in product development.” The new metaphor engenders organizational practices targeted at fostering innovation. One such practice is establishment of professionally and organizationally diverse development teams charged with creatively combining individual competencies within the resulting product. A longitudinal field study of one such team was conducted in order to build a practice-based framework for understanding cross-boundary collaboration on IS development (ISD) projects. The frameworks shows that multi-party ISD collaboration can be understood as a struggle of agents situated in nested and intersecting industry, organization, profession, and project-based settings or “fields-of-practice.” The development practice is situated at the nexus of these fields. It can be seen as a collective “reflection-in-action” process that increasingly defines the product. Whose competencies get to be reflected in the product and the degree of novelty the product achieves depend on agents challenging or following established status relationships within project teams and across organizations and professional groups.