What Drives Waves in Information Systems: The Organizing Vision Perspective

Waves of fashionable ideas shape the practice and research of information systems (IS). What forces drive idea waves in IS? This research takes the first step to empirically study IS idea waves in inter-organizational communities through the lens of organizing visions. Introduced by Swanson and Ramiller (1997), an organizing vision is a focal community idea for applying information technologies in organizations. Each organizing vision is produced and sustained through a discourse whose popularity often runs a wave-like lifecycle. By studying the discourse promoting enterprise resource planning (ERP), I examine the influence of four forces on the upswing phase of an organizing vision discourse wave: (1) a business problematic highlighted by discourse, (2) the early market for an IS innovation, (3) core technologies, and (4) the collapse of old organizing visions in a problem domain. A better understanding of the relationship between key forces and organizing vision development will help both practitioners and researchers monitor and relate to the exciting waves in our field.