Gli impatti organizzativi delle piattaforme di Enterprise Content Management sui processi decisionali

The focus of this thesis is to analyze the correlations between the competitive advantage, associated to the improvement of the process of decision making, and the content management through the Enterprise Content Management platform (ECM). One scope of this work is to increase the Knowledge Management (KM) literature and in particular to seek the correlation between the ECM Systems and the Decision Support Systems. Enterprise Content Management platforms largely have been analyzed according to Transaction Cost Theory (Reimer, 2002; McKeever, 2003; Smith and McKeen, 2003; O'Callaghan and Smits, 2005; Tyrväinen et al., 2006) and generally are described as useful for the reduction of ECM costs inside an organization (McKeever, 2003). Through empirical analyses, various authors have stressed that ECM tools increase efficiency and reduce management and research costs. Few studies consider the impacts of these tools on the organization or company processes. In particular, no research has highlighted the strategic role of ECM platforms in Enterprise Content Management (Gupta et al., 2002; Helfat and Peteraf, 2003; Smith and McKeen, 2003; O'Callaghan and Smits, 2005) as a means to improve and speed up the decision-making process. The case study will be analyzed by the Knowledge Based View. Specifically, the knowledge-based view (KBV) constitutes a fundamental essence of the resource-based view (RBV; Conner and Prahalad, 1996), reflecting the importance of knowledge assets. The knowledge and enterprise content generated thus can be interpreted not only as strategic resources to achieve or maintain a competitive advantage but also as useful tools for developing and expanding the company’s ability to respond promptly to unexpected events in the external environment and therefore perfect decision making within the organization. According to several authors (Barney, 1991; Amit and Schoemaker, 1993; Peteraf, 1993; Winter, 1995; Grover et al., 2009), the Resource Based View (RBV) cites knowledge as a resource that can generate information asymmetries and thus a competitive advantage for the enterprises that possess it. Reconsidering the general theory on the RBV and including knowledge assets among an enterprise’s intangible resources easily results in the KBV. If the term “acquired resources” from the general RBV proposed by Lippman and Rumelt (1982) and Barney (1986) gets replaced by “knowledge,” the result is KBV theory, and knowledge represents one of the strategic factors for maintaining a competitive advantage (Grant and Baden-Fuller, 1995; Grant, 1996c; Teece et al., 1997; Sambamurthy and Subramani, 2005; Bach et al., 2008; Choi et al., 2008). The availability of content thus is necessary, but it is not a sufficient condition to improve the decision-making process and company performance. Rather, the company also needs to transform “passive” contents, such as unused information within the boundaries of organizational memory, into “active” sources that are integral to the decision-making process. To improve the decision-making process and create value, the enterprises must enrich the quality and quantity of all information that provides critical input to a decision. The goal therefore involves an ability to manage knowledge in- and outside the organization by transforming data into knowledge. In the case analyzed, decision-makers achieve the best performance not only improving the quantity and quality of input information to the decisional process but also thanks to a better formalization of the knowledge included in all phases of the process. In this view, ECM platforms are advanced KM tools that are fundamental for the development of a competitive advantage, in that they simplify and speed up the management (creation, classification, storing, change, deletion) of information, increase the productivity of each member, and improve the efficiency of the system (McKeever, 2003; Nordheim and Päivärinta, 2004; O' Callaghan and Smits, 2005). By implementing an ECM system, the company has not only an effective means for creating, tracking, managing, and archiving all company content but also can integrate business processes, develop collaborative actions through the systemic organization of work teams, and create a search engine with specialized “business logic views.” Standardized contents and layout, associated with a definition of content owners and users (i.e., management of authorizations), and document processes support the spread of updated, error-free information to various organizational actors. Similar to business intelligence systems, ECM platforms support decision making inside the organizations in terms of viewing and retrieving data and analyzing and sharing information—and thus increase organizational memory—as well as their storage and continuous maintenance along the life cycle of the enterprise. For the analysis of the case study, this study employs the action research method (Lewin, 1946; Checkland, 1985; Checkland and Scholes, 1990), and specifically Multiview2 (Avison and Wood-Harper, 2003). The original Multiview concept assumed a continuous interaction between analysts and method, including the present situation and the future scenario that originated by application of the methodology. In some respects, the original definition was limited, in that it did not describe the function of each element and the trend of possible interactions (Avison and Wood-Harper, 2003). Multiview2 fills these gaps by taking into consideration the action and reaction generated by the interactions of the elements. The three macro-categories therefore must be aligned to conduct an organizational, socio-technical, and technological analysis (Avison et al., 1998; Avison and Wood-Harper, 2003). The researcher provides a clear contribution that matches the theoretical framework used as a reference and measures and evaluates in subsequent phases the results obtained from those implemented actions.