Information technology at IKEA: an "open sesame" solution or just another type of facility?

Information technology and such business applications as IT systems create great expectations to solve most problems a company faces. However, these expectations are seldom fulfilled. This article treats IT and IT systems simply as a facility among many other resources (products, facilities, business units and relationships) in business networks. By making use of a case study centred around Product Information Assistance (PIA), one of IKEA`s key IT systems for product information administration, the analytical part extracts a series of interactions patterns between IT facilities and the surrounding resources. Being IT systems also embedded into other resources implies that their effects seldom turn out to be as expected or simply defined by their technical potentials. (c) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.