Who uses information resources?: interoranizational incentives for gathering data and going online

D o all organizations need to gather information? Is each firm independently driven to collect data? Authors and theorists who write about information resources largely assume the answer to each of these questions is "Yes! " And their predictions about the use of information resources suggest that, in an Information Age, the efficiencies of online over print media will provide compelling incentives for moving to electronic information forms and formats. Despite such incentives, the volume and frequency of online use reported by many organizations remain below the levels that information providers and researchers expect. In a recent study aimed at understanding this divergence between predicted and actual use, I conducted interviews with scientists, lawyers, brokers, information researchers, managers and executives at twenty-six California organizations in three industries: biotechnology, real estate and law. Informants spoke candidly about how they use information resources as they perform their daily activities. They described how technical and institutional environments shape their data gathering practices. New economic pressures in institutional environments and increasing documentation pressures in technical environments provide strong incentives for going online. But, these pressures are then redistributed through an interorganizational network of firms and institutions in each industry. Only by understanding a firm's set of interorganizational associations, can one make reliable predictions about its use of information resources. In biotech firms, for example, I found that a company's relationship to the major institutions of its industry largely determines how much and what kind of data it collects. Companies that interact directly with large regulatory agencies, such as FDA, EPA, OSHA and DEA, collect more data than those that do not. These companies construct voluminous, well-defined information packages to inform regulators about their products and processes and to obtain agency approval. By contrast, biotech companies that interact indirectly with regulators report that they purchase supporting information services, outsource particular data gathering activities, or form reciprocal relationships with peer firms that do interact directly for the use of their information resources. Informant descriptions consistently emphasized the interorganizational relationships associated with their data gathering incentives. Relationships are key to understanding information system resource dependencies. In all three industries, these local arrangements provide opportunities for shifting information resource use across organizational boundaries. In biotech companies, this takes the form of outsourcing or partnering. In law firms, the industry infrastructure and quid-pro-quo arrangements among firms extend the set of choices about how to gather data. In commercial real estate, the client relationship determines how much data gathering the brokerage must perform. So, although each organization in an industry may be subject to a similar set of institutional and technical pressures to gather data, these pressures are often redistributed through interorganizational relationships. The interorganizational network is a dependent part of the information system. Within each network of organizations, choices about relationships entail choices about data gathering, and they influence choices about information resources and information systems. Organizations are not all independently incented to gather data and to use information resources. These findings form the basis for a new institutionalist model of organizational information resource use that explains why some firms undertake massive data gathering projects, and why others gather very little data and use few information resources. Taken together, the study observations and this new theoretical model convincing demonstrate when interorganizational relationships can shift data gathering activities and information resource use across organizational boundaries, and how understanding a company's set ofinterorganizational associations can lead to more reliable predictions about its use of information resources. For further details about this study, see: http://info.cwru. edu! rlamb Please contact me with your comments: rel@po.cwru. edu