Platforms & Ecosystems

Why institutional theory and resource dependence explain platform imperialism better than headlines do.

Three posts on ERP failure, and none of them applied structuration theory. Giddens and Orlikowski explain exactly why the same SAP instance produces different o...

Open banking APIs are boundary resources, RegTech is institutional isomorphism, and DeFi is disintermediation. Finance journals borrow IS theory quietly.

Organizations are not victims of vendor lock-in. They are participants in a game where both sides know the rules. TCE explains the costs. Resource dependence ex...

When OpenAI restricted GPT-4's function calling, it made a governance decision disguised as a product update. Boundary resources are where platform power actual...

Activity theory says you cannot understand tool use without the full activity system around it. The same tool in two systems means two completely different thin...

The platform that controls the agent communication protocol will control the Internet of Agents, just as Google owned search and Apple owned mobile.

Scaling agile to 500 people across three time zones is a different problem entirely. The frameworks meant to help often just create new bureaucracy.

Gartner projects the AI agent software market at $376.3B by 2027 and only about 130 real vendors behind it. The gap between the market number and the reality is...

Training AI models consumes staggering amounts of energy. Trist and Bamforth showed in 1951 why optimizing only the technical subsystem creates a collapse.

Network effects theory explains why AI markets concentrate around a few providers and why the data flywheel makes it nearly impossible for new entrants to catch...

When 80% of unauthorized AI use is internal policy violations, AI security platforms are governance products, not security products.

Access to AI tools is not the barrier. The belief that you can use them effectively is what separates who gains and who falls behind.

APIs let companies monetize capabilities rather than products. The strategic logic is platform theory, and the dependency chain it creates is intentional.

Most organizations have dashboards showing last month's numbers and call it data-driven. That is BI. An analytics culture is something different, and harder.

When the iPhone became better than the company laptop, IT departments had to decide how much control was worth the fight. Neither option was clean.

CDSS tools fire alerts, suggest diagnoses, flag drug interactions. But when the algorithm is wrong and the doctor follows it anyway, who is responsible for the ...

Cloud migration is sold as a cost-reduction play. In practice, many organizations end up spending more and quietly moving workloads back.

Gartner projects public cloud reaching $1.48 trillion by 2029, doubling from 2025. Getting there requires physical infrastructure, energy capacity, and organiza...

When enterprise software exhausts its users, that is not a training problem. It is a design problem with a cognitive load explanation.

Hardware-level encryption during processing changes the risk side of the privacy calculus. IS privacy models were built for a world that no longer exists.

Melvin Conway observed in 1967 that organizations produce systems that mirror their communication structures. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

Dashboards fail when they are built for reporting instead of decision-making. DeLone and McLean show why, and Torres and Sidorova show what to do about it.

Gartner forecasts $788 billion in data center systems spending in 2026. That number is infrastructure for AI, and infrastructure has always been more political ...

Organizations buy CI/CD pipelines and call it DevOps. The DORA research says the differentiating factor is culture, not tooling.

DORA 2024 found 90% of organizations have adopted at least one platform engineering practice. The gap between adoption and value is a sociotechnical problem, no...

A handful of US and Chinese companies control most of the internet's infrastructure. IS research still treats Western organizational contexts as the default.

Subsidized broadband matters. But the gap between having internet and using it to improve your life is wider than the access frame admits.

Compliance asks 'are we allowed to do this?' Ethics asks 'should we do this?' In most organizations, the first question is answered and the second is never aske...

A project ends when you ship. A product never really finishes. Organizations that still run IT like a project shop while trying to compete in a product-driven m...

Distributed IS projects face coordination overhead that project plans rarely account for. COVID made this everyone's problem at once.

Healthcare.gov crashed on launch day in 2013. The pattern behind that failure runs through government IT for decades. It is not a technology problem.

HITECH and Meaningful Use pushed EHR adoption to near-universal levels. The adoption story looks like success. The outcomes story is more complicated.

The person who signs the check never has to use the tool. That structural gap explains more about enterprise adoption than any UX framework ever will.

When ERP implementations fail, the postmortem always says the software was fine and the change management was missing. That phrase hides what actually happened:...

Flexera 2025 found 84% of organizations struggling to manage cloud spend and budgets overrun by 17%. FinOps stopped being an engineering function when the cloud...

Uber sets the prices, assigns the work, and deactivates accounts. Calling that 'independent contracting' is a governance choice, not a neutral fact.

Data centers, AI training, and hardware manufacturing all have environmental footprints. The digital economy's energy costs are growing and largely invisible to...

The US has spent billions on EHRs since 2009. Patient records still don't move between systems. Fax machines still work. Here's why.

Most organizations manage vendor relationships reactively. They notice a contract is about to auto-renew, realize they don't know if they're getting value, and ...

Markus and Robey gave IS three ways to think about causation. Two of them are traps. The third is where almost every real phenomenon lives.

Most ML models fail after deployment, not during training. MLOps is the discipline that finally takes production seriously.

Trist and Bamforth showed in 1951 that optimizing only the technical subsystem destroys the social one. Silicon Valley rediscovered this lesson and called it a ...

Metcalfe's Law, two-sided markets, and the chicken-and-egg problem are not just business stories. They are IS research problems about sociotechnical infrastruct...

Open data initiatives promise neutral access to government information. What gets published, in what format, and how usable it is reflects political choices.

Open-weight AI is digital commons at global scale. The question is not open versus closed but governance design, and Ostrom's principles tell us where to start.

Culture operates below the level where IS implementations are designed. Schein's three levels explain why EHRs and ERPs keep running into invisible walls.

Nick Srnicek's platform capitalism framework explains how companies extract value by controlling infrastructure. IS researchers can study what this does to work...

Platform engineering packages infrastructure expertise as a service for product teams, treating developer experience as something that can be built, maintained,...

Platforms are not pipelines. When you confuse the two, you miss who actually holds the power and why the rules are never neutral.

In multi-sided platforms, the business model is not separate from the architecture. Changing how you make money usually means rebuilding the system that makes m...

Cloud spending hit $723.4 billion in 2025. Flexera says 27% of it is wasted. That is nearly $200 billion in idle compute, over-provisioned storage, and forgotte...

COVID-19 forced the largest unplanned IS deployment in history. What it revealed about organizations was not what most people expected.

SaaS was supposed to replace unpredictable capital expenditure with clean monthly operating costs. For many organizations a decade in, the math is not working o...

Sovereign cloud IaaS hits $80 billion in 2026 with 35.6% growth. What Gartner is forecasting is not a compliance checkbox trend. It is governments rewriting the...

COVID forced telehealth adoption overnight. The waivers, the reimbursement, the video calls. Now the question is which parts of that experiment actually held.

Venkatesh added hedonic motivation, habit, and price value to UTAUT for consumer contexts. Enterprise software still runs on the utilitarian-only version. That ...

Enterprise vendors don't accidentally create lock-in. They engineer it. Understanding this changes how you evaluate software contracts.

The Standish Group has tracked IT project outcomes for decades. The numbers have barely moved. This is a structural problem, not a competence problem.