Information Technology Mediated Activities in Organizational Contexts - A Case of Strategic Information Systems Planning

Information systems planning (ISP) work has changed tremendously during the last twenty years. Previously as a work of IT/IS professionals it has now changed towards a collaborative planning challenge of several stakeholders, such as top managers, business unit managers, IT/IS professionals and even external stakeholders such as customers, partners etc. In addition to that it is very often labelled as strategic planning of information systems with many relations to business conditions and industry structure. Hence, ISP is not any more an isolated activity, it is a evolving work activity of business organizations. The emergence of information systems planning in organizations includes a number of theories and frameworks. They describe evolution of information systems and ISP in certain specific eras or stages, of which the most famous one is perhaps the stages of growth -model proposed by Nolan (1979). These theories and frameworks include one to ten different dimensions or factors which try to describe the nature of ISP. The main problem in theory building is therefore how to connect and show the linkages of those factors and leave space to emergent evolution of IS planning work. Evolutionary factors of models are not interlinked or described in a coherent model which include the other evolutionary elements of organizations and their environment, such as evolution of organizational environment, business planning, development of IT industry, technology in general, organizational learning etc. This means that we need theoretical models which reflect the evolutionary impact and influence of different factors to each other and puts the theory of evolution of IS planning in an emergent organizational form. In this paper an attempt is made to combine different respected evolution models of organizational science, including IS research, and suggest a more covering theory for understanding the evolution of IS planning in organizations. Activity theoretical research is used as a guiding vehicle for that purpose.