title: The strategy conveyance process in IT services: how entangled spaces enable strategy practitioners to make sense of tensions over time
Creators: name: Keyse, Jane
Publisher: name: University of Reading
Year: 2024

description: Purpose – To theorise how strategy practitioners use different communication practices to
support sensemaking about the tensions inherent in IT portfolio strategy in fast moving IT
services. Exploring the role of narratives texts and discursive activities in conveying salient
tensions affecting current and future praxis.
Findings – This study offers something novel by way of presenting how the conveyance1 of
strategy process unfolds over time through a series of inter-related and flexible spaces that
bridge the sensegiving-sensemaking process. The spaces act to assemble practitioners,
practices, and tensions, exhibit flexible boundaries, and instil movement in a sequenced flow
overtime. Each conveyance space is characterized by types of metaphors, sensegiver
attributes, and sets of tensions that surface within or across spaces that become relevant
and salient for sensegivers/sensemakers.
Theoretical contributions – This study contributes to the calls for more focus on actionable
knowledge for strategy practitioners (Jarzabkowski and Wilson, 2006; Splitter and Seidl,
2011), to study paradox as process and practice (Jarzabkowski, Lê and Bednarek, 2018), to
decide what practices are strategic (Jarzabkowski, Kavas and Krull, 2021) and finally, begins
to connect SAP research to other domains (Kohtamäki et al., 2022).
Design/methodology/methods – This constructionist grounded theory longitudinal study
was conducted in a Portfolio Management business unit of a large enterprise IT Services
company, with data gathering via interviews, observation, and primary document analysis.
Findings were emergent from the data and then analysed using bodies of literature across a
combination of the Strategy as Practice (SAP), Organizational Space, and the Organizational
Paradox domains.
Research implications and areas for further research – This study illuminates strategy
practitioners use of spaces to work through their understanding of tensions over time, and
the entangled role that narratives and texts play within that process. It suggests fruitful
connections between strategy as practice and the domains of organisation space, paradox
and the socio material interdependence between agents and the artefacts they employ.
Practical implications – Organizational leaders must comprehend that the conveyance of IT
portfolio strategy is a process, one inherent with tensional ‘spaces’ throughout the journey.
Leaders need to establish consistent narratives with supporting texts, using clear language
and relevant metaphors, along with exhibiting a set of sensegiver attributes that work to
highlight and mitigate tensions for the practitioners experiencing the process.
Originality/value – This thesis offers some explanation of the organizational spaces, sets of
tensions, and metaphors that affect the sensegiving/sensemaking of practitioners during the
conveyance of IT portfolio strategy, and a conceptual framework illustrating the strategy
conveyance bridging process (SCBP), itself an example of a socially interactive process.