دانلود رایگان مقاله فناوری و عمل بسط یافته توسعه نرم افزار جهانی

Abstract

In this paper we propose an understanding of spatially and temporally extended practice. By introducing the notion of ‘appresentation’, we describe how global IT business actors make sense of matters that they cannot know directly. We make appresentation apparent by discussing how vendors take account of the needs of future customers and also of their current users of whom they have no direct knowledge. Based on long-term research into Information Technology market dynamics, we offer three examples of appresentation, used strategically by global IT vendors to link to sites and times that they have no direct experience of and examine how they extend their sense-making resources outwards from the local situation. The work that we call appresentation consists of a set of strategies including (i) preparation; (ii) user endowment and (iii) user segmentation. We contribute to existing perspectives on extended practice by describing how not knowing is used to produce knowledge that extends beyond the single site.

8. The complex social fabric of appresentation

work Observation of ‘appresentation work’ in global software development helps reveal the complex social fabric between ERP vendors and their clients. This fabric lets them make sense, and convey some confidence about matters on what they have no direct experience. We focused in particular on how vendors (and users) appresent the global user base. Vendors achieve ‘user appresentation’ by making users recognizably the same (i) through preparing them to conceive of their requirements in a form that is generic enough to fit the whole user community, (ii) by passing the task of assimilating users over to other users and (iii) by progressively changing the criteria for segmenting users from seniority to future-orientation. The concept of appresentation invites us to consider the strong link between the concretely presented circumstances of vendors' situated encounters with users (e.g., their co-located conversations about technical properties taking place in meetings, their closeness to reference sites), and what is not concretely ‘present’ (that is the need to look always for the next client and for further developments of the software platform). The notion of appresentation stresses the inescapability of the link between what is locally present and what is not. As Husserl suggests, what is not present is ‘always’ and ‘necessarily’ implicated along with what is immediately apparent and determines the sense of what is seen (Husserl, 1960, 1931: 109). In other words, vendors as well as their clients would be unable to work on the properties of ERP systems without referring to what is not present. For example, IT vendors meet groups of users not only to understand their specific problems, but also to turn them into ‘sellers’ (Rowlands, 2010) who can encourage other users elsewhere to align their requirements with those of a user community. When vendors establish a partnership with strategically important clients, it is to achieve a better understanding of the client's local organizational context. But, at the same time, it is also to confer on selected users a benchmark status for the future development of ‘best practice software’ (Wagner, Scott, & Galliers, 2006), i.e., software that can be used successfully by other organizations in the same sector. The concept of appresentation should therefore be taken as a lens that directs attention to the methods by which ERP vendors and their clients make sense ‘locally’ of what is beyond their reach and, reciprocally, actualize what is not present to make sense of local user interaction.