John D. Evans, Ph.D.
MIT Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning
E-mail: jdevans@mit.edu
Phone/Fax: 617-734-1512
Mail: 1404 Commonwealth Ave. #4
Brighton, MA 02135-3722
 

INTRODUCTION

Sharing geographic information is often seen as either a technological problem or an organizational one, each with quite distinct research thrusts: whereas some may seek to build, say, data-translation software or navigational tools, others may tackle such matters as institutional inertia or intellectual property.  These focused research efforts are valuable in their own right; but in an unsettled, rapidly changing technological and organizational context, sharing geographic information is rarely a purely technical problem or a purely organizational one (Evans and Ferreira, 1995). For instance, technical innovations such as interoperable interfaces may only affect information sharing in organizations that are encouraging their members to pursue cooperative approaches to their work. Conversely, the "inertia" that slows use of outside geographic data may in fact be a quite sensible response to difficult data-coordination problems tied to the constraints of current technology and to the complexity of the data itself.

To understand and guide the growth of interoperable information sharing, its helpful to consider organizational and technical interoperability as interdependent, moving targets. As the next two paragraphs summarize, this perspective finds support in leading sociological theory, and has proven valuable to the study of inter-agency geographic information infrastructures.
 

SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
In describing the relation between technologies and organizations, Markus and Robey (1988) emphasize an *emergent* perspective, focused on the interactions between organizations and technology, in contrast with both a *technological determinism* (in which technologies are presumed to have known, inexorable effects on organizations) or a *social strategic choice* (in which technologies are seen as inexorably shaped by peoples intentions and actions).  Barley (1986) examines these interactions as they unfold over time, and invokes *structuration theory* (Giddens, 1984) to trace the ongoing, recursive influence between an organizations structure (i.e., its rules and resources) and the behavior of its members, as change is triggered by new technologies. The structuration perspective is sensitive not only to the effects of group norms, rules, and broader trends, but also to the influence of people acting unpredictably within and on these forces. Applying the structuration perspective to information technology, DeSanctis and Poole (1994) emphasize the "intertwined" nature of technological and behavioral patterns, and Orlikowski (1992) proposes a useful view of technology as a malleable structural property of organizations: that is, a set of rules and resources that enable some actions, while constraining others, and that are in turn shaped by those actions over time. Within a structuration perspective, organizational intentions alone cannot give rise to a given technology, nor can a technology have a fully predictable effect on organizations. Rather, in every phase of a technologys existence -- its conception, design, deployment, use, evaluation, and modification -- the human actors involved mediate both causal effects in unpredictable ways.

Furthermore, in this perspective, both technological and organizational change are considered normal and ongoing: particularly in the case of large information networks, this implies "organic, yet systematic" change over time (Spackman, 1990). Designers of information systems often make the more-or-less tacit assumption that organizations are static -- that structural changes are abnormal
and reach an equilibrium. Conversely, organizational thinking tends to accept technologies as artifacts with stable features and a fixed role.  However, particularly as seen through the structuration perspective, social structures undergo constant change, and information technology itself is an element of that social structure, enabling some actions, constraining others, and itself shaped by those very actions over time (Orlikowski, 1992).Within this perspective, the technical design of an information sharing infrastructure is ineluctably tied to its ongoing implementation and use within an organizational context.

The cyclical, dynamic perspective provided by structuration theory is concept- ually pleasing; and in  addition, it provided a fruitful model for an empirical study of interoperable geographic information sharing infrastructures (Evans, 1997).
 

EMPIRICAL STUDY
A recent case study of three inter-agency geographic information infrastructures (the Great Lakes Information Network, the Gulf of Maine Environmental Data and Information Management System, and the Pacific Northwest StreamNet and its predecessors) shows the value of the perspective described above. In seeking to describe and understand these cases, traditional one-way factor models of technologys impact on organizations, or organizational impacts on technology, inevitably led to "chicken-and-egg" dilemmas, accounted poorly for change over time, and blurred the roles of individuals, groups, and broader societal trends. Instead, the structuration perspective elucidated a cycle of influence similar to that described by Orlikowski (1992), with mutual influences between organizational, technological, and policy/planning structures, and the actions that people perform on and within those structures (cf. Figure 1).

Figure 1: Mutual influence of technology, organization, and policy/planning on people and actions

These cyclical, dynamic patterns of influence provided new insights into the growth and change mechanisms evidenced in the three cases. First, rather than postulate direct influences between constructs like technology, organizations, or policy, this model sees all of the influences as mediated by human actors enabled and constrained by these constructs. For instance, as technological standards influenced what people could do (arrow a); some of these people chose to create new partnerships (arrow b); in so doing, they sometimes found themselves empowered or slowed by broader laws (arrow e). Second, this model proved fruitful in understanding the evolution (or stagnation) of the three inter-agency efforts towards interoperable information sharing: in particular, it reconciled the free-will choices of particular "champions" with the influence of their evolving social and technological context. Third, this model suggested any number of levers for perturbing existing behavior and guiding it towards a particular target, while making it clear that interoperable information sharing infrastructures are less a set of fixed, interlocking technical and organizational components than a chosen direction, or even a style, of evolution through an uncertain future. Although a broad set of levers can be pulled to affect sharing, collaboration, or consensus, their influence on outcomes is uncertain and only temporary. Thus, any solutions considered should be conceived as packages of mutually-influencing technological and organizational features, and as pathways of not-fully-predictable growth and change over time.

In summary, a "holistic" view of technological and organizational interoperability in concert, rather than in isolation, is persuasive for the study of inter-agency geographic information systems; it can be rigorous thanks to the structuration model, and has proven useful through its insights into recent empirical findings.
 

REFERENCES
Barley, Stephen R., 1986. "Technology as an occasion for structuring: evidence from observations of CT scanners and the social order of radiology departments." Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 31, 1986, pp. 78-108.

DeSanctis, Geraldine, and Poole, Marshall Scott, 1994. "Capturing the complexity in advanced technology use: adaptive structuration theory." Organization Science, Vol. 5, No. 2, May 1994.

Evans, John D., 1997. Infrastructures for sharing geographic information among environmental agencies. Ph. D. dissertation (unpublished), Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass. (USA).

Evans, John D., and Ferreira, Joseph Jr., 1995. "Sharing spatial information in an imperfect world: interactions between technical and organizational issues." Chapter 27 of Onsrud, Harlan J., and Rushton, Gerard (eds.), Sharing Geographic Information. New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers University.

Giddens, Anthony, 1984. The Constitution of Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Markus, M. Lynne, and Robey, Daniel, 1988. Information technology and organizational change: causal structure in theory and research.
Management Science, Vol. 34, No. 5, pp. 583-598.

Orlikowski, Wanda J., 1992. "The duality of technology: rethinking the concept of technology in the context of organizations." Organization Science, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 398-427.

Spackman, J. W. C., 1990. "The networked organisation." British Telecommunications Engineering, Vol. 9, April 1990.