How do Organizations Make use of ICTs to Cope With Organizational Complexities? A Case-Study

This contribution questions how people manage to harness the capabilities offered by IT so as to cope with organizational complexities in their daily work environment. To study the addressed research question, we conduct an explorative case study in the field of military technologies. This case study is based on a research contract funded by the French ministry of Defence, which especially questioned the effects of new information systems on current military operations. This article focuses on current operations in Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom, OEF) as they represent the opportunity for the NATO forces to experiment with a new model of warfare which consists in using a bundle of ITs to connect all battlefield components (weapons, sensors, databases and personnel) into a network-centric organizational form. The case study findings indicate that people learn to combine a variety of tangible and intangible resources encapsulated in IT to deal with four forms of complexity. However, such combinations also trigger the emergence of unexpected biases on decision making and communication processes. Building on these results, we elaborate on a model of IT uses that relies on the notion of combination, and discuss its main implications for both scholars and practitioners.