Trajectory of IT Artifacts in Live Routines: Organizing Project-Based Workforce in Professional Services through Enterprise Systems

Professional services organizations are under the same pressures to streamline their operations and increase efficiency as industrial organizations. One way of making the operations more efficient and leveraging a global workforce is to use enterprise systems for HR and project personnel management. However, it seems that the process-oriented nature of enterprise systems is better suited for manufacturing than knowledge based operations. We use an interpretative longitudinal case to show how the organization and its systems evolve from quite rigid control oriented unified process model into a more flexible coordinated support system. Drawing on the theories of IT artifacts and routines (e.g. Pentland and Feldman, 2008) we argue that professional services organizations should pay more attention to the trajectory of IT artifacts and organizational routines over time. Our contribution is to demonstrate how IT artifacts evolve over time to accommodate to the local needs of users.