The Resilience of Pre-Merger Fields of Practice During Post-Merger Information Systems Development

This article analyzes the interactions among individuals engaged in information system development (ISD) projects aimed to support an organization created by the merger of previously independent entities. The authors draw on a practice perspective on knowledge sharing across boundaries to analyze two ISD projects in a post-merger integration (PMI) context of the merger of three hospitals. In both projects, the final IS-enabled practices differed from the post-merger practices that had been planned by the hospital management. Our analysis suggests that pre-merger fields of practice tend to be resilient, and that this resilience originates in some of the agents' actions aimed at maintaining the status quo. In addition, they found this resilience to be facilitated by the ease of tailoring the software packages used to develop the two IS.