What contribution of collaborative technologies to the configuration of organizations?

Abstract

Collaborative technologies (corporate social networks, Wiki platforms, groupware, etc.)are often considered as one of the most important developments in the business world. Al-though the perception of managers is positive in the majority of studies carried out (Andri-ole, 2010), the concrete effects of collaborative technologies are still difficult to identify inorganizations, and are relatively ambiguous. In particular, one can question the contri-bution of collaborative technologies to the formation of specific organizational configura-tions (Puranam et al., 2012). In fact, recent works emphasized the need to analyze moredeeply the contribution of IS to organizational configurations (Deweet and Jones, 2001;Zammuto et al., 2007; Markus, 2010; Pascal, 2012). In this exploratory work, we confirmthat collaborative technologies can be structuring artifacts of organizational configura-tions, and that there exist three possible configurations identified in our case studies