Organizational identity and information systems: how organizational ICT reflect who an organization is

Received: 14 January 2011 Revised: 01 August 2011 2nd Revision: 06 February 2012 3rd Revision: 28 June 2012 4th Revision: 15 June 2013 5th Revision: 01 September 2013 Accepted: 30 September 2013 Abstract The work reported here contributes to our understanding of organizational identity regarding its influence on organizational action related to the development of information and communications technologies (ICT). The empirical basis of this work comes from case studies of integrated criminal justice information systems (IJIS). IJIS are organizational and technological ensembles created to facilitate inter-organizational information sharing among criminal justice agencies. The focus of these case studies was to examine how organizational identity shapes organizational ICT. This research found that organizational identity shapes an organization’s ICT-related processes and is reflected in the material configurations of an organization’s ICT; and that organizations with different identities exhibit those differences in their ICT. Three implications of this research are that organizational identity serves as both an enabler and constraint on organizational ICT development; organizational identity commitments will likely serve as a barrier to large-scale integration of different organizations’ systems; organizational identity is relatively static and difficult to change. European Journal of Information Systems (2014) 23, 69–83. doi:10.1057/ejis.2013.32; published online 19 November 2013