There are several potential explanations of why the IS field has largely missed the processes whereby small business owners come to notice or consider IT, and arrive at suitable courses of action. They include historical evolution of IT in organizations, trends of knowledge production in the field, and methodological difficulties.
First of all, both the evolution of IT in organizations and the scholarly efforts in our field to keep abreast of this evolution partly account for the blind spots. In the very early days of organizational computing, computer-based technologies were expensive and
knowledge about them was scarce. These features had distinctive consequences not only for how IT was rolled out in practice, but also for how academia approached these emergent realities. At the practice side, high costs made IT innovation a privilege of the few, mostly very large organizations that could afford technological innovation.
Similarly, there was no such thing as IT marketplaces for products, services or jobs, or at least not in the way we know them to exist today. This meant that most IT innovation initiatives started as in-house systems development projects (Markus 1999). In these organizations, as well as in accompanying academic research, awareness of the
technology to be adopted could be safely presupposed or achieved, and IT adoption at the individual level was largely constituted as the problem of ensuring that targeted
Over time, the market for IT innovations increased, the IT industry grew, and exciting opportunities emerged for organizations to get IT products and services from the marketplace. Software could be bought and used as is, or bought and customized. Ambitious software innovations, such as CASE tools, decision support systems, executive systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP), or customer relationship
management (CRM), gradually became available as software packages. Researchers then set off to study the adoption of these promising innovations. In designing their samples, they were careful to select respondents who would be involved in purchase decisions. Again, awareness of the innovation was a fair assumption to hold. When the focal IT was a software development tool, IT managers were surveyed, and they would presumably be cognizant of technology advances relevant to their work. When the focal IT was a
business application (e.g., ERP, CRM), the momentum sustained by technology vendors and the media (Wang and Swanson 2008) increased the chances that the technology was salient to surveyed business managers. Similarly, IT outsourcing became feasible and popular (Lacity and Hirschheim 1993). Outsourcing, nonetheless, was generally viewed as the domain of large companies which needed to find a way to cut down IT costs, while rebalancing the amount and nature of the IT work being done in-house (Loh and
Venkatraman 1992). Therefore, most research remained within the confines of large organizations, where internal IT expertise and resources usually exist, and thus the
recognition of IT-related needs and the identification of relevant IT alternatives continued to be ignored or viewed as relatively minor concerns.
Consequently, IT adoption at the organizational level was constituted around the problem of understanding the factors that drive IT uptake in organizations, and not around issues
concerning attention, search, or choice, even though the industry trends mentioned earlier suggested that those issues were becoming increasingly important management problems.
Further changes in the IT marketplace have included end-user computing, more packaged software, open source licensing, cloud-based software delivery, and mobility, among many others. Researchers have witnessed, explored and come to understand remarkably well all these trends. Being familiar with the ever-evolving IT landscape, IS scholars can easily notice IT, or changes in IT, and can readily come up with distinct IT alternatives when designing a new study, without needing to look for them. The problem, though, is that most ordinary people are not seasoned IT explorers. Small business owners, who are my empirical setting, are ordinary people who may come to notice IT and IT changes differently, and who might struggle to identify suitable courses of action in this
convoluted marketplace. Interestingly, complexity of the IT marketplace is so great that similar observations have been made since the early 1980s and even in the context of large businesses (Huff and Munro 1985; Michell and Fitzgerald 1997).
A specific aspect of the usual path towards knowledge creation about decision making in the social and behavioural sciences at large, and IS specifically, has also been implicated in the current state of affairs, and I present it as a second reason for the blind spots. Early research about business decision making usually held a fairly rationalistic view of
decision making processes, whereas later research has reacted to what is seen as excessive rationalism or instrumentality, thereby striving towards portraying a more socially embedded view of decision making. This trend is visible in most IS research concerned with decision making (Avgerou 2000), and has already been noted about research on IT adoption and diffusion (Fichman 2004; Harwood 2011; Swanson and
Ramiller 1997) and on IT procurement (Howcroft and Light 2006; Pollock and Williams 2007; Tingling and Parent 2002). Through this reactive mode of operation, socially- embedded approaches have successfully attained a deeper, more nuanced understanding of studied phenomena, but they have done so at the expense of breadth. Put more precisely, in the context of IT adoption and IT procurement socially-embedded approaches have reacted against rationalistic approaches by pointing at the limited usefulness of seeing IT choices as purely rational, but have failed to notice how much there is for us to study beyond choice itself. Getting to the point where a choice among competing courses of action can be made is a central portion of the problem that deserves serious examination.
A third reason for the blind spots is associated with methodological difficulties for
capturing the early stages of the process in a timely manner. Pollock and Williams (2007) note that IT procurement is infrequent, its early stages can be short and ad-hoc, and by the time researchers gain access to a research site some of these early moments will already have passed. Therefore, field researchers are likely to start their investigations after some cues have led decision makers to see IT as a potential response to a situation facing the business, and after some courses of action have already been defined.