Research in progress: where are all the people? the curious case of one-person IT departments

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we present a research-in-progress study that examines the characteristics of IT-departments that consist of a single employee. Spurred by the findings of a master's student project, we examined the data from another study we had conducted that revealed that fully 44% of municipalities in a Scandinavian country have such one-person-departments. Our survey also revealed that these "departments" provide full service to the municipalities which are quite heavy users of IT services. The obvious question is "how is it possible for the apparently skeletal IT department to provide full service?" Have we stumbled upon a new form of organizing the IT function? In this paper, we aim to map such departments to the models and frameworks that appear in the IS literature. We plan to conduct a series of interpretive case studies to understand how and why this structure emerged and what implications this has for IT personnel employed in these departments and the IT service delivery for organizations.

REFERENCES

• 1: Agarwal, R. and Sambamurthy, V. .Principles and models for organizing the it function, MIS Quarterly Executive, 1, 1 (2002), 1--16.
• 2: Ritu Agarwal , Thomas W. Ferratt, Crafting an HR strategy to meet the need for IT workers, Communications of the ACM, v.44 n.7, p.58-64, July 2001 [doi>10.1145/379300.379314]
• 3: Boyne, G.A. Public and private management: what's the difference?, Journal of Management Studies, 39, 1 (2002), 98--122.
• 4: Brown, C.V. and Sambamurthy, V., Re-Positioning the IT Organization to Facilitate Business Transformations, Pinnaflex Press, 1999.
• 5: Dearden, J. The withering of the IS department, Sloan Management Review, (Summer, 1987), 87--91.
• 6: Elam, J.J., Ginzberg M.J., Keen, P.G.W. and Zmud, R.W. Transforming the IS Organization: The Mission, The Framework, The Transition, ICIT Press, 1998.
• 7: Harvey G. Enns , Thomas W. Ferratt , Jayesh Prasad, Antecedents and consequences of traditional and virtual IT professionals' satisfaction with employment arrangements, Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGCPR conference on Computer personnel research, May 14-16, 2002, Kristiansand, Norway [doi>10.1145/512360.512387]
• 8: Edmond P. Fitzgerald , Aileen Cater-Steel, Champagne training on a beer budget, Communications of the ACM, v.38 n.7, p.49-60, July 1995 [doi>10.1145/213859.214798]
• 9: Hellang, O, Lindblom, E., Moe, C.E. and Sein, M.K. e-Government and municipal organizational change, Proceedings of NOKOBIT-2006, Molde, Norway, 2006.
• 10: Michelle L. Kaarst-Brown , Indira R. Guzman, Who is "the IT workforce"?: challenges facing policy makers, educators, management, and research, Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGMIS CPR conference on Computer personnel research, April 14-16, 2005, Atlanta, Georgia, USA [doi>10.1145/1055973.1055975]
• 11: King, J. Ryder trucks out entire is operation, Computerworld (February 9, 1998).
• 12: Fred Niederman , Xiaorui Hu, Electronic commerce personnel in the age of clicks and mortar: toward a framework of individual and project level skills, Proceedings of the 2003 SIGMIS conference on Computer personnel research: Freedom in Philadelphia--leveraging differences and diversity in the IT workforce, April 10-12, 2003, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania [doi>10.1145/761849.761866]
• 13: Hallgeir Nilsen , Maung K. Sein, What is really important in supporting end-users?, Proceedings of the 2004 SIGMIS conference on Computer personnel research: Careers, culture, and ethics in a networked environment, April 22-24, 2004, Tucson, AZ, USA [doi>10.1145/982372.982383]
• 14: Orlikowski, W. and Baroudi, J.J. The information systems profession: myth or reality? Office Technology and People, 4 (1989), 13--30.
• 15: Rocheleau, B and Wu, L. Public versus private information systems: do they differ in important ways? a review and empirical test, American Review of Public Administration, 32, 4 (2002), 379--397.
• 16: V. Sambamurthy , Robert W. Zmud, Research Commentary: The Organizing Logic for an Enterprise's IT Activities in the Digital Era--A Prognosis of Practice and a Call for Research, Information Systems Research, v.11 n.2, p.105-114, June 2000 [doi>10.1287/isre.11.2.105.11780]
• 17: V. Sambamurthy , Robert W. Zmud, Arrangements for information technology governance: a theory of multiple contingencies, MIS Quarterly, v.23 n.2, p.261-290, June 1999 [doi>10.2307/249754]
• 18: Walsham, G.. The emergence of interpretivism in IS research. Information Systems Research, 4, 4 (1996) 376--394.
• 19: Zmud, R.W. Design alternatives for organizing information systems activities, MIS Quarterly, 8, 2 (1984), 79--93.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.6 MANAGEMENT OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS
      K.6.1 Project and People Management
          Subjects: Staffing

General Terms:
Human Factors, Management

Keywords:
IT organization, IT personnel, career paths