Week 12 Slage et al. 2015 Yiran

Understanding the triggers of senior managers’ IS investment decisions is important for both IS scholarship and IS practice. In this paper, the authors integrate insights from the behavioral theory of the firm and neoinstitutional theory to better understand how hospital senior managers make decisions about how and how much to invest in IS. Building on the understanding of IS investments as a form of organizational search, they argue that at least four recurring search mechanisms (i.e. problemitics search, institutionalized search, mimetic search and slack search) will influence the decision of the amount of resources allocated to IS.

Problemistic search is defined as search that is stimulated by a problem and is directed toward finding a solution to that problem. Slack search refers to a process that when resources are viewed as being in surplus, senior managers will seek to identify promising investment opportunities. Institutionalized search is commonly known as search conducted by organizations, which tends to be orderly, standardized, and somewhat independent of success or failure. Mimetic search can be conceived as a “search for information about what organizational characteristics are legitimated in their environmental niche. The first two search mechanism can be explained as behavioral search mechanism, while the last two are supported by neoinstitutional theory.

They draw on panel data from all 153 nonspecialist public hospital organizations in England. Findings from our dynamic panel data analyses suggest that hospital managers’ IS investment decisions are driven not only by the desire to improve organizational performance (problemistic search), but also by the need to achieve continuity in resource allocation (institutionalized search) and to signal compliance with external norms and expectations (mimetic search). The objective of making adequate use of uncommitted resources (slack search), however, was found to be salient as a trigger of IS investments only among hospital organizations with low regulative legitimacy.