Abstract
Obtaining anticipated benefits from an adopted management innovation depends on attaining a consistency in stakeholders’ interpretations of, or notions of, both the objectives being sought from the innovation and the nature of the innovation functionalities being deployed. Deployment governance systems play important roles in attaining a sufficiency in notional consistency by first exposing and then coalescing stakeholders’ understandings of the deployed innovation. This paper focuses on the design of governance systems applied in guiding the deployment of an especially demanding management innovation – a shared service center (SSC) being implemented within a multi-organizational context. Specifically, we studied the deployment of a SSC providing data and networking services (with the dual objective of achieving cost-economies and leveraging the provisioned common data and networking services to facilitate interactions among members of the organizations being serviced) within a consortium of twelve work units from two distinct organizations (a university and a federal government agency). Within each of these two organizations, the work units involved with the SSC deployment pursued quite different agenda and exhibited little interaction prior to the formation of the consortium. In such a context, stakeholders’ notional consistency would be expected to develop slowly, if at all, due to the differences in unit-level vested interests, cultures, and adoption agendas.