Using bricolage to integrate business and information technology innovation in SMEs

Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) can experience difficulties in adopting Information Systems (IS) and aligning them with their strategic development. Using the concept of bricolage, an improvisational approach that allows learning from concrete experience, we explore IS adoption and organisational change in two SME case studies. The case studies cover IS rationalisations and innovations and small-and large-scale change over a 4-year period, and highlight the roles of different actors, internal and external to the SMEs. We find that bricolage is a useful concept as it deals with the need for SMEs to learn about the possibilities of IS in situ, simultaneously exploiting the can-do approach that is usually found in SMEs. However, bricolage needs organisation space and the possibility for trust to grow between end users, developers and management as visions are explored and revised. The paper concludes with a set of guiding principles that can be adopted by SMEs to enable IS bricolage to contribute to an organisation's strategic direction. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.