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Articles and Book Chapters
When systems loose their identity. Equivocality and Sensemaking in ISD

Author
Jørgen P. Bansler and Erling C. Havn

Reference & Publication Year
Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Information Systems, Turku, Finland, June 14-16, 2004

Abstract
This paper reports a longitudinal study of the design and implementation of a Web-based groupware
application. We studied the development of three versions of the application, and the preliminary
discussions of the forth. We adopt a sensemaking perspective to analyze the dynamics of this
process and show that improvisational action and bricolage (make do with the materials at hand)
played a vital role in the development process, successfully within a small group of people, but less
so when more, distributed people became involved. The paper introduces the problem of distributed
sensemaking in IS development.