Brief Presentation of Organizational Information Services

Lars Mathiassen	Carsten Sørensen	
Georgia State University	London School of Economics	

This note highlights some of the essential aspects of the full paper circulated for the workshop. The core assumption guiding our work has been to understand the diversity of elementary services relating algorithmic support to specific organizational information processing needs. This is consistent with a large body of work within the field of Information Systems going back the past 40 years. As such we seek to place specific computational capabilities in a context of use. Computer science has traditionally focused on both the essence of the computer system and the processes by which it is constructed. There has not been a tradition for considering these computer systems in the pragmatic contexts in which they are brought into use. We assume that for some computer systems the construction and use processes can be highly intertwined and that essential insights can be made by not only seeking to characterize the systems seen as isolated artifacts but rather to see them in terms of the relationships between the system and the organizational decisions it supports. 
In terms of the computer system situated in organizations, most research has emphasized algorithmic codification and automation of decision processes, whereas we saw that other additional ways of characterizing the role of computer systems for decision making. Along with a range of other sources, we were in particular encouraged by reading Wegner’s 1997 paper in CACM, where our concerns were raised from within a computer science perspective, highlighting the need for not only characterizing computer system properties in terms of algorithmic codification but also in terms of the interaction emerging from patterns of use.
The purpose of our paper is to characterize information services from a socio-technical point of view emphasizing how configurations of people and computer artifacts interact to support work, communication, and decision-making inside organizations and across organizational boundaries. We suggest that information services distinguish themselves from, but are intrinsically related to business services and software services. Business services (e.g. related to transactions and investments within the financial sector) are provided through business processes enabled by information services (e.g. about accounts, transactions and investment options). Information services are in turn enabled by software services provided through computational processes, e.g. to support human-computer interaction, retrieve data, or calculate results. Information services are hence enacted to enable business services to customers supported by different forms of software services and other forms of IT artifacts. As a special case, business services within certain industries (e.g. news and media) are themselves information services. 
The characterization of how diverse information services can support decision making in organizations is based on the following five propositions highlighting the need for information services to adapt to the uncertainty and equivocality of decisions they take and on the distinction between decision making supported by technologically mediated encounters versus relationships. Developing a contingency theory for information management support we argue in Proposition 4 and 5 for specific configuration of information services depending on the uncertainty and equivocality profile. 
Proposition 1: Organizational actors need portfolios of information services that are suited to the uncertainty and equivocality profile they face.
Proposition 2: Information services are consumed by organizational actors to help produce and make use of information.
Proposition 3: Information services are provided by configurations of people and IT artifacts through encounter and relationship interactions.
Proposition 4: Information services that help make use of information are well suited to low uncertainty requirements while information services that help produce additional information are well suited to high uncertainty requirements.
Proposition 5: Information services based on encounter interactions are well suited to low equivocality requirements while information services based on relationship interactions are well suited to high equivocality requirements.
The table below summarize the diversity of information services depending on the uncertainty and equivocality profile in terms of computational, adaptive, networking and collaborative services

		Uncertainty	
		Low	High	
Equivocality	High	Adaptive service
Use of information
Relationship service. Standardized Information	Collaborative service
Production of information
Relationship service. Standardized Material	
	Low	Computational service
Use of information
Encounter service. Standardized Process	Networking service
Production of information
Encounter service. Standardized Connection	
		Need-to-do-something	Need-to-know-something	

Computational services rely on encounter services and support organizational actors in transforming available and formalized information into organizational decisions by following standardized and repeatable patterns of information processing. Traditional transaction systems such as the account management system in a bank make computational services available for customers and employees. Information about transactions, accounts, customers, and financial advisors is readily available and unequivocal. 
Adaptive services help actors interpret and transform available and emergent information into organizational decisions by adapting standardized patterns of information processing to specific work contexts. Adaptive services rely on relationships and allow the involved actors to explore and debate interpretations during task execution. In tasks with many actors involved, unexpected combinations of events can make it necessary to negotiate interpretations before making local decisions. An example of an adaptive service is the negotiation of grocery deliveries at Tesco.com, an advanced UK on-line grocery store. The standard task of ordering groceries involves customers ordering from the website, paying for it with a credit card, and choosing delivery date and time. This normally implies using a computational service, but in several instances, the customer may instead evoke an adaptive service. For example, discrepancies between the items ordered on the Internet and those delivered to the door - caused by stock shortage or human error when picking goods - require negotiations to take place between the customer and the delivery person or between the customer and an employee at a telephone call-centre. The increased equivocality requires the delivery van driver to negotiate preferences to ascertain if the customer wishes to accept the items or receive a refund.
Networking services help actors produce information about phenomena in an organization and its environment by following standardized and repeatable patterns of information processing. Networking services rely on encounters and they typically connect actors to relevant information sources through IT artifacts such as email systems, search engines, electronic libraries, mobile phones, and SMS messaging. These technologies offer readily available support by providing users with immediate access to relevant information sources. A simple search on Google offers a networking service in which a search term generates a list of ranked results according to the Google index. 
Collaborative services support organizational actors produce information about phenomena in an organization and its environment through interpretation of the specific work context. Collaborative services rely on relationships. The use of a networking service such as forwarding a simple and standardized inquiry on the telephone, for example about the account code for a project, may indeed turn out to be a much more equivocal task of debating practices for assigning account codes to projects. This equivocality implies engaging a relationship service to produce additional information by, e.g., searching the corporate intranet, exchanging individual documents as email attachments, and negotiating possible new principles for assigning account codes to projects. Platforms such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange Server offer the ability to set up collaborative services with shared workspaces, coordination mechanisms, and mutual awareness of ongoing activities.
Considering the individual information service as an artefact standardising aspects of information management and decision-making, we can ask ourselves what exactly the four types of information services standardize?
Computational services ensures efficiency, speed, and uniform delivery by programming the computerized and partly the human information processing involved. Computational services require, in this way, standardization of socio-technical information processes to provide standardized, repeatable responses across different work contexts. Hence, the computational encounter represents a service with a pre-defined process of input, computation, and subsequent output and standardizes process. 
Adaptive services, on the other hand, are organized as relationships and executed by competent actors that cope with equivocal tasks through use of available information. Task execution is not standardized, because the specifics of each situation must be taken into account as they become clear. Still, information-processing requirements are, on a generic level, stable. It is therefore possible to provide IT-based support by standardizing the information involved in executing tasks. While computational services standardize both information and process, adaptive services mainly standardize information and leave it open how information is used in response to the situation at hand according to the unfolding relationship. 
Networking services support tasks with uncertain, but unequivocal, information processing requirements. These services are organized as brief encounters in which actors are linked to sources to identify and access relevant information as needed. Because of high uncertainty, it is not possible to standardize the information needed during task execution. Instead, these services standardize IT-enabled connections to a range of sources that might prove helpful in producing information during task execution. 
Collaborative services are designed to support tasks with highly equivocal and uncertain information requirements. These services are designed as relationships that allow the involved actors to generate, share, and make use of information in response to emergent needs during task execution. Application of IT artifacts for these purposes requires standardization of the material that mediates information sharing and collaboration between the actors. Examples of such standardized material include digitized texts, plans, models, as well as complex multi-modal materials with mixtures of traditional data, images, and sound.