Beyond the user participation: The re-construction of usability

The main goal of this paper is to present how a service company transforms its work flows trough IT integration, how employees and managers accommodate or resist to it and how it impacts on the long term customer-services relationship. Our focus is the adaptation processes between the theoretical planning of the strategic managers and the real implementation at the sale department level. The presentation underlines the mutual shaping and learning taking place between the different actors. The company first involved in a IT-based Business Process Reengineering, followed by continual moderate changes using the computing system as the main, and almost only, communication channel. The central system contains all data which are modified constantly at different levels (technical, organisational and marketing). This situation keeps the employees in a precarious stability, since they have to update and to adapt, mostly by themselves, to all kind of information. Referring to the conceptual framework developed in the "Social Construction of Technology", we offer a different perspective on the gap between expectations raised by technology and the actual appropriation of employees, since "mere implementation of technology" is viewed as an ongoing negotiation process, where the system, users and organisation are continually transformed (Thorough going interpretivism, [1]). Moreover, we think that this type of situation offers a good starting point to analyse what we could define as a collective learning process.