People from different departments – or stakeholders with distinctive areas of expertise, including IT – are often called on to work closely together. How do these actors adapt to the way other people think and act? This is the pivotal question posed by a study co-authored by Elise Berlinski, a researcher at NEOMA.

The use of IT in the world of business has resulted in far-reaching changes to the ways companies operate. Some researchers argue that this new technology represents an optimistic technological revolution that is leading to improved decision-making, visibility and transparency. Other commentators are more critical, drawing attention to the risks of dehumanisation and the danger that workers will be replaced by machines and hidden surveillance. Either way, the potential of IT and its attendant risks are remodelling organisations and society as a whole.

IT’s almost universal adoption by business is already changing the way user companies are run. Future developments – such as big data and artificial intelligence – will pose unique challenges as they transform current practices and the way different communities work with each other. This is the case, for example, when a firm embeds cutting-edge professional software. What happens when people working in the same company, either in separate areas or different services, have to collaborate on a new digital package? The study by the NEOMA researcher and her partner investigates how the introduction of a new IT system impacted on the relevant communities.

Divergent epistemic models

Every profession has its own rules, its own standards and its own ways of looking at things – what researchers call “epistemic models”. These are adopted by professional communities as a way to organise themselves. However, the competing epistemic models may breed conflict as soon as the different communities are called on to work together. And this is exactly what the researchers observed when they honed in on the interactions between accountants and IT specialists in the same firm as it developed and implemented a software package.

The company’s management controllers saw the software as a way to offload the low-status work involved in producing data, meaning they could then shift focus to decision-support activities. The controllers viewed IT as a custom-built solution; the tech specialists, on the other hand, saw the software packages as complex, breakable and flexible assemblages that could subsequently be transposed to meet as yet unidentified needs. In similar fashion, while the accounting way of organising was hierarchical, IT leant towards collaboration and modularity, both of which made it possible, for example, to modify portions of the code without distorting it.

Users almost always fail to get to grips with IT processes and operations, which creates a conflict between expectations and feasibility, and between demand and implementation. The researchers point out, however, that the conflicts observed in this instance ran deeper. The divergences were as much about the functionality of the software as the coordination of the work. This finding is observed more broadly when two (or more) departments in a company, which are not connected by a hierarchical link, are required to work closely together. In these cases, knowledge and goals may even end up on a collision course.

Rethinking ways of doing things

The researchers demonstrate that a plurality of new epistemic models emerges through socio-material interactions, i.e., in a context that brings different individuals together and the IT systems that link them. Compromise, learning, exchange and trial and error then bring about changes in practice.

The study foregrounds the limitations of conventional organisational approaches such as accounting, which evolves when challenged by modern IT systems. The researchers argue that IT should not be limited solely to catering to user needs. In fact, the discipline is key to a radically innovative way of doing things. It is based on decentralised, modular and collaborative work between remote teams, sometimes with no hierarchical links.

The researchers subsequently asked the question: could IT mobilise and transfer its model to other specialist areas? Could we, for example, conceive of a modular and decentralised form of accounting? In broader terms, will the widespread presence of IT and its endless innovations transform the organisational model of companies as we currently know it?

Read more

BERLINSKI, E., J. MORALES, “Digital technologies and accounting quantification: The emergence of two divergent knowledge templates”, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 2024, vol. 98, no. 102697 – https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2023.102697