University or Universality: On the Establishment of the ‘Organisationally Generic’

Neil Pollock, University of Edinburgh, and Tasos Karadedos, University of Edinburgh

1/01/2005
(Original Publish Date: 8/25/2004)

This paper focuses on issues concerning standardisation, the mobility of artefacts, global software solutions and the impossible dream of establishing the 'organisationally generic'. Its starting point is the (relatively?) recent and interesting phenomena as to why the same few organizational information systems, like enterprise resource planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to name but a few, are being applied in the most diverse of organisational settings - public and private sector sites, manufacturing and finance, hospitals and universities, centralised and dispersed, large and small firms alike. How do software packages achieve the mobility that allows them to cross the most heterogenous of organisational spaces? How do they become, to use the term suppliers adopt all to prematurely, a 'global solution'? In addition, what makes a software package a global (as opposed to a local, national, regional, or something else) solution? We compare the history and biography of two software packages being developed for use within universities and consider the question as to how they become 'universal'. We investigate the strategies of software suppliers in configuring their software and user communities as they deploy a range of 'generification strategies' and attempt to establish what might be described the 'organisationally generic'. Generification strategies are the processes whereby they establish similarities and comparabilities between users and their domains and, at the same time, generify this knowledge so that it is not too embedded in any one setting so as to limit the mobility of the package.