The Uneven Diffusion of Collaborative Technology in a Large Organization

This paper investigates the large-scale diffusion of a collaborative technology in a range of different business contexts. The empirical data used in the article were obtained from a longitudinal (2007–2009) case study of a global oil and gas company (OGC). Our study reports on ongoing efforts to deploy an integrated collaborative system that uses Microsoft SharePoint (MSP) technology. We assess MSP as a configurational technology and analyze the diffusion of a metadata standard developed in-house, which forms an embedded component of MSP. We focus on two different organizational contexts, namely research and development (R&D) and oil and gas production (OGP), and illustrate the key differences between the ways in which configurational technology is managed and used in these contexts, which results in an uneven diffusion. In contrast with previous studies, we unravel the organizational and technological complexity involved, and thus empirically illustrate the flexibility of large-scale technology and show how the trajectories of the various components are influenced by multiple modes of ordering.