Best practices or improvisation in system change? An exploratory study

Regarding system change (innovation, implementation, reorganization, etc.) there is a long running dichotomous debate in many IS sub-disciplines as to how the change should be handled. Some promote prescription via models, method, and industry best practices, while others promote agility and local-level improvisation and prototyping. Both approaches have been adopted by practitioners, resulting in widely used development and implementation frameworks such as ITIL (best practices) and Scrum (prototyping). However, neither approach has dominated the other, with appropriation seemingly relying on the preferences of decision makers. While it could be argued that an organization should simply pick the approach that works for them, the issue in large multi-level stakeholder environments (for example) may not be so straightforward. This can affect many important organizational outcome concerns such as alignment. The issue is further complicated when a traditionally 'top-down' organization such as a government suddenly switches to a more 'bottomup' way of working and developing IT. In order to begin a discussion and expand the foundation for system change, we explore practitioner views of these two approaches in the midst of major system change and compare and contrast these views regarding both services and enterprise systems.