skip to main content
10.1145/1235000.1235014acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagescprConference Proceedingsconference-collections
Article

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

Published: 19 April 2007 Publication History

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]
Agarwal, R. and Ferratt, T.W. Crafting an HR strategy to meet the need for IT workers, Communications of the ACM, 44, 7 (2001), 58--64.
[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]
Enns, H.G., Ferratt, T.W., and Prasad, J. Antecedents and consequences of traditional and virtual IT professionals' satisfaction with employment arrangements", Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGCPR Conference, Kristiansand, Norway, 2002, 111--119.
[8]
Fitzgerald, E.P., and Carter-Steel, A. Champagne training on a beer budget. Communications of the ACM, 38, 1 (1995), 49--60.
[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]
Kaarst-Brown, M.L. and Guzman, I. Who is the IT workforce?: challenges facing policy makers, educators, management and research, Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGMIS CPR Conference, Atlanta, GA, 2005, 1--8.
[11]
King, J. Ryder trucks out entire is operation, Computerworld (February 9, 1998).
[12]
Niederman, F. and Hu, X. Electronic commerce personnel in the age of clicks and mortar: toward a framework of individual and project level skills, Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGMIS CPR Conference, Philadelphia, PA, 2003, 104--110.
[13]
Nilsen, H. and Sein, M. K. What is really important in supporting end-users? Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGMIS CPR Conference, Tucson, AZ, 2004, 48--54.
[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]
Sambamurthy, V. and Zmud, R.W. The organizing logic of it activities in the digital era: a prognosis of practice and a call for research, Information Systems Research, (2000), 105--114.
[17]
Sambamurthy, V. and Zmud, R.W. Factors influencing information technology management architectures in organizations: a theory of multiple contingencies, MIS Quarterly, 23,2 (1999), 261--290.
[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

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

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGMIS CPR '07: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGMIS CPR conference on Computer personnel research: The global information technology workforce
    April 2007
    246 pages
    ISBN:9781595936417
    DOI:10.1145/1235000
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 19 April 2007

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. IT organization
    2. IT personnel
    3. career paths

    Qualifiers

    • Article

    Conference

    SIGMIS-CPR07
    Sponsor:

    Acceptance Rates

    Overall Acceptance Rate 300 of 480 submissions, 63%

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • 0
      Total Citations
    • 272
      Total Downloads
    • Downloads (Last 12 months)2
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
    Reflects downloads up to 20 Jan 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media