Week7- Reading Summary -Leting Zhang

Given the sourcing trends are unexamined fully, the paper establishes two research goals:1. assess whether organizations are trending toward one sourcing approach over another;2. examine the extent to which organizational antecedents influence the relative rate at which organizations move toward a specific IS sourcing configuration.  Specifically, what’re the answers in the context of healthcare and sourcing decision within EMRS (Electronic Medical Record Systems).

Under the theoretical framework of institutional theory, the authors identify several factors that may impact institutional pressures and therefore influence the adoption decision. 1.strategic orientation, more specifically, whether a hospital is for-profit or not, teaching or not; 2. formal structure, including hospital size and hospital health system size; 3. Case complexity. It mainly uses two data sources: HIMSS database and HospitalCompare database. Thus they can capture the modules that were integrated into the EMRS, the associated suppliers and the contract year, then they can construct the patterns of implementation over year.Then they code sourcing strategies and compare sequence similarities using a matching algorithm by R. Every hospital receives a score based on how many moves it would take to transform its sequence into the prototypical single-sourcing sequence. For the independent variables part, they mainly focus on five variables, which are antecedent, and their interaction with time. The result shows there is not a statistically significant interaction between time and FP hospital; teaching hospitals move toward single-sourcing more quickly; Hospital with higher CMI is more slowly in adopting single sourcing.As their hypotheses put, the size of a hospital has a statistically significant negative interaction with time, but it is not the case for the size of the hospital system. They also give reasonable explanations for the inconsistency.

The paper has several theoretical and managerial contribution. For example, it uses a novel sequence analysis approach to quantifying sourcing configurations. What’s more, it illustrates the how institutional factor influence sourcing strategy factors.