Tommasso Colombino, John. A. Hughes and Mark Rouncefield

(Lancaster University)

It would be difficult to overestimate either the interest (academic and commercial) or the self-evident 'hype' associated with the development of electronic commerce - a fascination that has merely slowed with the recent weakening of new technology stocks in general and the well reported collapse of some 'dotcoms'. The fascination is understandable with young, attractive, clever, 'paper' multi-millionaires, entrepreneurs of the 'new economy' suddenly being confronted by enormous reversals of fortune ( accompanied, no doubt, by widespread schadenfreude at the sudden loss of the Porche and the Docklands apartment). One of the key features regarded as central to this ‘new economy’, (the 'network economy', the 'information economy', the 'knowledge economy', the 'digital world', to mention just a few of the appellations created to convey its putatively revolutionary character) is the technological revolution of cheap computer based communication and networking and its utilisation in the marketing and selling of goods and services. The social and economic impact of this development is likened to the technological revolution of the first industrial age. One the most flaunted aspects of this latest technological revolution is its global reach; the growing interconnectedness of the world’s economies as a source both of economic growth and vulnerability. But the ‘new economy’ is no longer, it is suggested, a form of capitalism based on industrial production but an economy increasingly dominated by the service sector. The new economic capital is ‘information’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘communication’: all of which can be electronically transmitted increasingly faster and cheaper. As Castells (1999: 17) describes it: ‘In the new, informational mode of development the source of productivity lies in the technology of knowledge generation, information processing and symbol communication’; and today it seems practically obligatory for both newly emergent and long standing enterprises to have some kind of web presence.

From the point of view of social science, while analyses of e-commerce do exist, they tend to focus on either theoretical considerations of its impact or base themselves on validating various economic models. Some theoretical accounts, such as those bound up with the Business Process Reengineering movement, focus upon the potential of e-commerce for the radical reinvention of business processes (Hammer and Champy, 1993), so tying e-commerce into the problems faced by businesses in an increasingly globally competitive economy. While e-commerce can be defined comprehensively enough to characterize the activities of any particular e-business, none of these definitions can provide an adequate account of the ad-hoc use that is made of the internet within the context of a specific business or practice. The consequence is that prescriptive managerial advice is vague and couched in appealing, but ultimately empty, buzz-words. For example the RosettaNet Standards Initiative (1998), appears wholly concerned with what shape e-commerce 'ought' to take with its suggestions of 'critical issues' to be attended to: e.g. "implementing effective customer interaction strategies"; "achieving privacy and secure transaction processes"; and "designing seamless e-commerce applications" (CTR, 1999). It betrays more concern with what a business should become, according to a set of theoretically-derived ideals, and little concern for what a business actually is. While some analyses of the development of e-commerce focus upon its economic potential (e.g. CTR, 1999) others retain a certain scepticism about the actual viability of e-commerce and the technological problems associated with its implementation (e.g. Green, 1999). What is missing from this literature is not a better definition or a better theory, but rather the recognition that the understanding of the implementation of internet delivery of commercial services can only be obtained through a detailed observation of the work involved in developing and maintaining an e-service.

Whilst e-commerce as an area of investigation is then not in itself new few studies have engaged in detailed, rich ethnographic investigation and fewer still have been interested in explicating features of the management of failure in e-commerce. This working paper presents just such a cautionary tale through an ethnographic study that documents and analyses the failure of a 'dotcom'. The company, Iqport.com, saw itself as operating as a 'knowledge market' - an internet based online marketplace for buying and selling knowledge - describing itself as 'the Nasdaq for knowledge' and bringing together individuals and organisations that wanted to share information. Initially supported by a major international bank (which, perhaps unfortunately for the project was then the target for a hostile take-over bid), Iqport was intended to operate on the principle of bringing together groups of people and organisations that wished to share and trade knowledge through 'guilds' of 'knowledge communities'. While other e-commerce approaches (and failures) were seen as simply replicating existing businesses or business practice, Iqport was regarded as a new paradigm through its emphasis on developing and sustaining knowledge and competency. However, despite apparently 'successful' 'soft-launch' and market trials further funding was not made available and the project folded after approximately nine months.

This paper reports on some observed features of the managerial work involved in 'organising' and 'ordering' failure. Our research - part of an ESRC funded project 'Developing and Realising Business Strategies in Electronic Commerce: An Ethnographic Study' - involved an attempt to understand the varied activities of the project - both launch and closedown - as a 'formatted organisational arrangement' (Button and Sharrock) within which various people - marketing people, accountants, technical staff, administrative personnel - were required to coordinate their various kinds of work activity. Throughout the launch, closedown, mothballing and attempted sale of Iqport, the problematic achievement of organisational and departmental objectives, within the constraints of time and budget was a constant concern. However, these constraints were themselves not entirely fixed but subject to negotiations, the outcome of which was uncertain. Dealing with these kinds of pressures and these kinds of uncertainties, what was grossly observable, in both the set-up and close-down of Iqport, was that many of the problems of the project were routinely addressed by the practical scheduling and re-organisation of the work. Orderliness within the project was achieved not just by organisational plans or procedures (though there were plenty of those) but by structuring the work in various ways. This structure was constantly worked at in the face of all kinds of contingencies. The observable orientation to plans, planning and re-planning was both a recognition of the contingent nature of much of the everyday work, and a way of managing such contingency.

At the time of the initial observations Iqport was preparing for commercial launch - 'soft-launch'. Iqport was an initiative from BigBank Electronic Markets - part of its developing e-commerce strategy - in alliance with Telecoms and based on an Oracle database front-ended with Lotus Domino. BigBank provided the secure payments engine as part of its strategy to explore commercial opportunities in the wider e-commerce marketplace. Iqport was positioned as a 'knowledge bank' or 'knowledge market', an internet based online marketplace for buying and selling knowledge. As an electronic market, Iqport was intended to bring together groups of people and organisations that wished to share and trade knowledge through 'guilds' of 'knowledge communities'.

The founders of Iqport argued that; "For knowledge workers, training and development is no longer a sustainable instrument to keep up with things, so we want to provide just-in-time knowledge. This is a mechanism for releasing knowledge that is not generally available". The business vision behind Iqport, as a knowledge market, was claimed to be "fear and greed" ("as you go through our business you will see fear and greed as the model"); the sellers desire to profit from their knowledge, the buyers concern that their knowledge was outdated or insufficient in some way. While e-commerce failures were seen as simply replicating existing businesses - putting a shopfront on the Web - Iqport was regarded as a new paradigm through its emphasis on developing and sustaining knowledge and competency: "Most annual reports see people as the key assets .. with a competency model to support the business strategy .. but competency gap analysis reveals that the competency gap is getting worse .. for the knowledge based worker its equivalent to 40 training days .. the traditional way of working cannot fill that gap .. most training programmes cannot cope with a fast changing world". In Iqport knowledge sellers put content into sealed wrappers and set a price for the information, paying Iqport a commission on any sales. Knowledge providers were organised in 'Guilds' which were 'communities of interest' and 'communities of practice'. The guilds also provided an accreditation scheme to endorse the information offered, so that buyers might have some idea of the value of the information being offered for sale. The initial Publicity pack - 'IQ Portfolio' - said of Iq Port (later changed to Iqport): "It focuses on providing opportunities to enable Knowledge Providers to publish their knowledge, and for Aquirers to access it swiftly and accurately. The cornerstone is the ability to deliver a service mix which allows access to all types of knowledge - from the tacit, 'in the head' through to the documented, explicit sort which resides in documents, reports and publications. The service is driven by knowledge communities or "Guilds' which support and sustain the needs of members through a portfolio of knowledge publishing and collaborative services." The eventual publicity pack - with a different logo and spelling of company name Iqport - argued: "The true value of information is achieved when it is transformed into relevant knowledge, filtered through wisdom and experience. With so many companies providing information services to the global business community, finding information that is timely, accurate, relevant and, above all, valuable is a challenge in itself." (click here to see some slides from the Iqport publicity)

A major aspect of our analysis of the work in Iqport involved an attempt to understand the varied activities of the personnel. Our take on this draws on Button and Sharrock's ethnomethodological analysis of 'project work', approaching the set up and closedown of Iqport documenting how the accomplishment and coordination of work was achieved. Our interest lies in explicating how the project members made their activity both mutually accountable, and, importantly given the administrative set-up of Iqport and its relationship to BigBank, organisationally accountable. Our focus was on observing and understanding how the members of the Iqport project displayed an orientation to project and organisational arrangements in the way they went about and ordered their everyday work in the face of a number of crucial organisational factors. Of particular importance, given the essentially ephemeral and marginal nature of the project within BigBank as a whole - and given the organisational contingencies that BigBank was facing - was the ever present possibility (eventually realised) that the project would be abandoned, that funding would be restricted, that key personnel would be moved to other work within BigBank. Throughout the set-up of Iqport this was a constant concern. Interestingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, similar concerns about funding, personnel and timing also haunted the closedown, mothballing and attempted sale.

The main constraints for the launch of Iqport centred on the exact technical and administrative specification of the product and whether they could actually deliver all the things they had promised . This meant whether they could meet the deadlines for launch scheduled for the individual sections within the project, and the project as a whole; and whether they could either control the spiralling costs of the project or elicit more funds (from BigBank or other sources). The constraints for the closedown of Iqport were very similar, focusing on closing down and mothballing the project on time - as epitomised in the constant refrain 'the lights go out in this building on 15th February' - and within budget, whilst simultaneously maintaining discussions for the sale of the project and its technology. What was observable in the set-up and especially the close-down of Iqport was that many of the problems of the project arose from the organisation of work and its organisational setting and that these problems were routinely addressed by the practical organisation and re-organisation of project work. Orderliness within the project was achieved not by organisational plans or procedures (though there were plenty of those) but by structuring the work in various ways. This structure was constantly worked at in the face of all kinds of contingencies, the most obvious of which in the closedown phase was uncertainty over whether and when a buyer could be found for the project. The observable orientation to plans, planning and re-planning was both a recognition of the contingent nature of work on the project, and a way of managing such contingency as the possibilities of a sale approached and receded.

In the close down phase plans provided a context for treating together different types of organisational activity both specific to the project and emanating from other organisational interactions - such as with the Bank. In the operational plans routinely presented as GANT charts or lists of activities and discussed at project meetings, activities were linked together within a particular and clearly delineated time frame. In this way both routine and 'unusual' or occasional concerns were oriented to as part of the organisation's activity. One of the most obvious aspects of planning was an overwhelming orientation to ensuring that necessary tasks were addressed, in the right order and with some kind of confirmation that the task had been adequately completed (what Button and Sharrock call 'phasing'). In the various operations meetings that attended both the launch and the closedown of Iqport considerable attention was given to documents that organised work in terms of phases of activity. This phasing was part of the trail of audit and accountability and was used to achieve a commonly available and understood sequential progression for the work and, importantly, thereby provide for the easy recognition of uncompleted steps or activities with some acknowledgement of appropriate responsibility. Though the tasks and activities were interdependent this had to be achieved in an orderly way. Such phasing also displayed an awareness of and sensitivity towards the timeliness of practical decision making - in a phase of the project when timeliness was essential - by carefully specifying the considerations relevant to a decision. The following examples from the fieldwork notes and transcripts illustrate this orientation to 'the plan' and the various phases of its implementation. In the first extract a meeting is being convened for the 'Soft Launch Plan'. Prior to the meeting there has been an intense email debate and the distribution of one of the section leader's (the Financial Director) outline considerations.

A similar orientation to phasing is exhibited in the far less cheerful circumstances of the closedown of the project. The fieldwork extract below details some features of an operations meeting as they consider the timescales and necessary technical, administrative and financial tasks required to achieve an efficient closedown of the project. At the same time they must bear in mind that they still hope to sell the project and therefore need to maintain some kind of access to the site so that potential buyers can get some sense of what they are buying .

Such phasing ensured compliance to a managerial desire that they were routinely able to measure their progression (provide figures) in achieving various objectives and thereby orient to the completion of the project as a whole. This involved getting feedback on how they were doing, how much had been done, where they were, and what remained to be done - and express this in various ways, especially numerically such as 85% complete; three days work and so on. The various plans enabled the different sections of the project to check their work against the schedules, to determine where they were relative to the schedule, how much they had already accomplished, how much more was to be done, how long relevant staff needed to be employed, and whether the work was likely to be completed on time. Plans also, necessarily, were the focus of various meetings, as documented in the fieldwork extract below:

The organisational importance placed on the creation of an audit trail was part of an attempt to ensure that the various tasks were handled methodically and that the appropriate documentation was completed and available. This was especially obvious in the closedown phase as the project and its technology was being mothballed and prepared for sale. For IT personnel documentation has always been regarded as 'dirty work', that is it was (and is) seen as a boring, routine and superfluous clerical task that is not integral to the job of developing the technology or getting it up and running. During closedown however the need to have a working model available and yet secure behind a 'firewall' meant that attention was necessarily focused on providing adequate documentation for access to and possible re-launch of the project.

What became readily apparent then in the case of this particular e-commerce project was the importance of organisation and planning as a set of contingent locally arranged activities that had, of necessity, to orient themselves in various ways to other organisational priorities - in particular the priorities of BigBank. The ordering activities, the plans distributed via email, the various informal discussions and 'Operations' meetings provided an opportunity to articulate local priorities and policies for the project, relative to other, wider organisational concerns. It facilitated linking the work of the different sections - finance, technical, marketing etc - sections who might be, and usually were, unaware of each other's problems. It facilitated the discussion of 'local' issues and their incorporation into the project plan. In this sense the plans developed provided an agenda, a list of areas of activity, some of which were new and some of which were ongoing, and all of which were specific for the project. The plans also provided a means of articulating the, often contradictory, values of the different team members as well as a way for managing the public relations or 'face' of the project. This facilitated discussion with the Guilds and potential 'knowledge providers' in order to maintain confidence and give a credible 'face' to the project.

We want to conclude this short working paper by considering some issues of calculation and calculability as they arose in the project. Of course, such an account threatens to miss much of the important activity that transpired in the nine months of the existence of Iqport, in particular the 'human story', the ambitions and dashed hopes, the bitterness and backbiting of a project team many of whom were our friends. As Williamson (1973) so cogently wrote " 'homo-sociologicus' neither laughs nor cries" and yet calculation of various kinds was at the centre of much of the 'human story' of Iqport - after all they all thought, they were convinced, that they were all going to be rich and the early days of the project were associated with talk of a stock-market launch or 'being bought out by Microsoft'. The calculation work we are interested in however, is the everyday, mundane work of calculation. In the everyday work of the Iqport project its activities - developing Guilds; setting up the technology; financial relationships with other organisations - and their representations became the focus for various forms of calculation and accounting work. Such calculation work is inherently complex and made more so by its location within the field of e-commerce where some commentators suggest the standard rules of business modelling, economics and accounting may not apply. The figures produced at the operations meetings were only one such locus for calculation work and they were interlinked with other sets of figures and calculations, for example from the Bank that was the sponsor and funder of the project. Such project accounting work was socially organised in a number of ways. Firstly calculation 'work' was not just the manipulation of figures but necessarily included the achievement and display of 'proper' calculation. Secondly, calculation involved the interweaving of various rationalities in the context of negotiations over resources, targets, 'soft launch' close down and so on. As in other forms of distributed working, calculation work within Iqport was calculation within a division of labour. In this fashion calculation work and organisation work were harmonised 'in and through the motifs of competent practical action'. This is related to what Anderson et al (1989) refer to as the 'lore of numbers' - the "capacity to play off the requirements for representing a set of activities through a system of calculation against the practicalities and obligations involved in performing those activities effectively and efficiently" (1989: 104)

Of course, within a developing business project in the comparatively new area of e-commerce the process was difficult and subject to emerging 'rules of thumb'. Eventually what emerged was a few 'quick and dirty' figures on which to make a judgement - what Anderson et al (1989) call a 'wild eyed guestimation'. What is interesting here is not the premiss of calculability but the work which project personnel did to make their activities fit with what might be characterised as 'accountants' terms. "This work involves grappling with the sheer practical difficulties of determining which figures are wanted, pulling them out, and then knowing how to manipulate them and assess their product." (105-6) The idea of' accountability' that emerged from this was not merely in terms of members accounts but as a specific form of members account - that conformed with particular 'rules' such as the audit rules of the bank, the rules on intellectual property and so on. This it was not simply a question of the staff seeing what was 'in the figures' since this itself had to be worked out, and working it out involved balancing a wide range of operational and organisational objectives and priorities. The figures that appeared, for example on the GANT charts, were themselves the end product of a series of procedures designed to give a picture, a representation, of the 'position' of the project. But, as is evident in this account, this picture was never clear or unambiguous since the figures were embedded in a nest of interactional, organisational and operational contingencies. The use of judgement in calculation was part of the work and for the project 'success' (whose definitrion varied but included, at different times, getting to 'soft-launch', sale or closedown on time and within budget) depended upon managing the interplay between precision and interpretation in calculation. In line with Garfinkel's (1967) 'Some rules of correct decision making that jurors respect' - the management team within Iqport were attempting to make calculations in line with what they considered would pass as rational and established methods of accounting. What is interesting about the work involved was that it consisted of a system of rules and their application in context - that is it was a system of calculability. The figures used in operations meetings were themselves the products of socially organised accounting work, they were 'displays' (Lynch 1985) of the methods used to produce them, enabling others to see how the result, the figures were produced. Any explication of the work of managing the project, of making the system of calculability work had to address what, for some specific occasion, constituted correctness, allowable error, the margins of probability and so on. The most obvious example of this came in 'crisis' situations like the closedown of the project, or its possible sale where the figures were subject to reinterpretation and the calculations were subject to reinterpretation and change.

Any comments or suggestions:

Contact author: Mark Rouncefield

Email m.rouncefield@lancaster.ac.uk

As this is a very drafty working paper, and likely to undergo considerable change, please do not cite without our permission - may I bring to your attention the fact that I have a very large, extremely violent brother who enjoys hurting people not directly related to him .. and he collects very large, very sharp knives.. when not out practicing with his guns...

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