Opportunities and Obstacles in Using IT Systems: Embedding Movex in Edsbyn’s Resource Network

Few technologies have been surrounded by so high expectations as Information Technology (IT). Visionaries, business consultants and academics alike regularly attributed to IT the power to open opportunities for firms to achieve efficiency and development. All this started 50 years ago, with the first applications of computers to Operations Research (Diebold, 1953; Herrman and Magee, 1953). Then, in the 1970s, IT-based ‘integrated information systems’ (Ramström, 1973: 15) offered the opportunity to monitor any contingency within a firm. However, these opportunities were not fully concretized because of social resistance to panoptical control (Zuboff, 1988: 320–4), irrelevant IT-borne information (Mintzberg, 1972) or excessive rigidity in computerized information systems (Hedberg and Jönsson, 1978).