Ruptures During IT-enabled Change: A Sensemaking and Imbrication Analysis

Focusing on imbrication change as conducted by designers during design and development, we undertook a 2.5-year long case study to examine how 10 hospitals configured technology and planned routine changes as they sought to transform their organizations. Our observations revealed a phenomenon we call ruptures, defined as situations that occur due to breakdowns in the process of IT-enabled change. Ruptures allow us to unpack the temporal process of identifying and resolving instances of disruptive problems during IT-enabled change. Our analysis of ruptures in this context expands the theory of imbrication to account for the role of designers. We demonstrate that three imbrication types – historical, envisioned and realized - exist cognitively during design and influence the design process. Our results demonstrate how problems arise, how dynamic change unfolds through sensemaking and how fractal, embedded, imbrications complicate the IT-enabled change process.