Proceedings of IRIS 23. Laboratorium for Interaction Technology, University of Trollhättan Uddevalla, 2000. L. Svensson, U. Snis, C. Sørensen, H. Fägerlind, T. Lindroth, M. Magnusson, C. Östlund (eds.) Business Development in IT- dependent organisations Torbjörn Nordström a , Mikael Söderström b & Ole Hanseth c atn@informatik.umu.se a , micke@informatik.umu.se b and ole.hanseth@ifi.uio.no c Umeå University a & b University of Oslo c Abstract Yesterday we built databases to support business processes. Today we seek to build business processes from existing databases. This means that business processes become closely related to IT-use, and also that use of IT can be an important part of business development. Use is, however, not entirely determined by the design of IT-artefacts, occasionally IT-artefacts are used different than planned. We call this phenomenon IT-bricolage. Essential to business development then, becomes to exploit and diffuse the innovative ways of using IT that can be the outcome of IT-bricolage. Cultivation is suggested as a suitable metaphor for this process. To cultivate IT-use requires that organisations find ways to monitor use. That is, to create organisational forms that; first, are capable of discover innovative IT-use, furthermore, are capable of realising that this use can be exploited in developing business processes, and finally, are capable of diffusing the discovered innovative use throughout the organisation. We regard knowledge of such cultivation as a necessary complement to knowledge of the design of IT-artefacts. Which individual, organisational and technical conditions that make this possible is far from obvious. Hence, we need to design, test and evaluate different methods for developing this ability in organisations. This is an area in which there is very little research done up to now. Keywords: IT-dependency, standardisation, enterprise systems, IT-bricolage, cultivation, business development 1. Introduction Today all large organisations are dependent on IT. It is difficult to imagine a gas station, a supermarket, a bank, or an airport without support of IT. In the supermarket, for instance, we can imagine someone manually adding up the price of each item to a total sum, which the customer then pays in cash, like it was done years ago. However, today the prices can not always be read on each item, but only the EAN-code and many customers do not carry their money in cash. Instead, they use credit cards. In the case of the supermarket both the company and its customers depend on IT to perform the prime business transactions. The same goes for banks. It would be very difficult for them to maintain their operations without IT, even though it is possible in principle. Managing, for instance, bank accounts entirely manually would require a huge staff, making the handling costs rather high.