From tool to Gestell
agendas for managing the information infrastructure
pp. 111-133
in: , Bricolage, care and information, Berlin, Springer, 2009Abstract
AbstractThe recent managerial literature on the development of corporate infrastructures to deliver sophisticated and flexible IT capabilities is based on a set of assumptions concerning the role of management in strategy formulation, planning and control; the role of IT as a tool; the linkages between infrastructure and business processes; the implementation process.This paper deconstructs such assumptions by gradually enriching the conventional management agenda with new priorities stemming from other styles of taking care of infrastructures. A first, enlarged agenda stems from the economics of national infrastructures. Managing such infrastructures consists of enacting tactics of interference with an almost autonomous "installed base"; aligning multiple stakeholders; fighting battles of standards; coping with irreversibility of investment decisions. Thus, economics shows that the scope for managerial control is severely limited. Various streams of social studies of technology provide an even more challenging agenda in which the infrastructure itself is an actor or an intermediate actant involved into complex games of reciprocal inscription and translations of stakeholders' interests.The original, straightforward management agenda appears, then, to be lacking: its foundations are irremediably shaken. The paper finally evokes a philosophybased agenda, the only one valuable in the uncharted territory where the usual foundations do not deliver any longer. Such an agenda speaks a language of weak agency: releasement; dwelling with mystery; capacity to drop the tools; valuing marginal practices. Will the last agenda play a key role in coping with the information infrastructures of the next millennium?