Revolutionising Decision Making with IT in the Newspaper Industry... or not ?
Résumé
This paper reports on a research project that investigated the key managerial processes of an organisation with special regard to decision making and the circulation of information between organisational actors. It is based on a novel, network-based top-down evaluation of the key actors, groups and institutional mechanisms that organisations rely upon when making decisions. This research experimented with techniques to visualise and represent how information circulates within organisations and how decisions are made by organisational actors. We studied an information intensive organisation having the publication of two newspaper titles as its core business in an attempt to analyse the process whereby organisational actors seek, gather, organise and disseminate the information and knowledge that make up the products of this organisation. The organisation studied had recently completed the implementation of computerised news collection and editorial systems which included some decision support components and we were particularly interested in studying the effects of the application of IT and the contribution of IT staff to these vital processes. We found that the implementation of the new systems has revolutionised the process of creation of the newspapers and given more time and a much greater amount of control to the Editorial team. It is however uncertain whether the benefits of this revolution have spilt outside the Editorial area of the firm. Overall, these findings indicate that focusing on the networks of organisations can provide an useful research vehicle for researchers of organisational life.