Hunting for meaning in a landscape of practice: The case of Chief Information Officers

The increasing complexity in the IT environment, characterised with constant emergence of new technologies, potential disruption, industry hyperbole, and states of uncertainty, has fuelled strong competitive strains for organisations to adapt and respond accordingly (Vial, 2019). Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are expected to lead organisations in adapting to the growing complexity of the IT environment by having an awareness and understanding of emerging technologies that are relevant to their organisations, and thus demonstrate strategic IT knowledge (Bendig et al., 2022).

Despite there being widespread consensus that obtaining strategic IT knowledge is an inherent necessity for CIOs to function effectively at strategic level (Smaltz et al., 2009), existing academic literature offers very limited insight on how CIOs develop their strategic IT knowledge. Therefore, this research aimed to offer a significant step towards understanding and explicating how CIOs navigate the complex IT environment to acquire knowledge and construct meanings of emerging technologies as a necessary effort to function effectively at strategic level. In doing so, it drew on the theoretical lens of landscapes of practice (Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner, 2014) to demonstrate CIOs’ development of strategic IT knowledge as a socially constituted experience of meaning making.

From an interpretivist standpoint, qualitative data were gathered using semi-structured interviews with 32 CIOs across the UK. CIO respondents were asked to provide accounts of meaning-making experiences relating to emerging technologies. Particular attention was given to how CIO respondents gained knowledge and negotiated meaning of emerging technologies, as well as how they accounted for the role of individual and collective practitioners that formed their social body of knowledge. 

The findings revealed that CIOs are embedded in an epistemic landscape of practice constituted by diverse landscape actors. These landscape actors were abstracted into three categories, namely landscape architects, landscape brokers, and landscape companions. To acquire knowledge and construct meanings of emerging technologies, CIOs heavily deferred to the expertise and knowledge of these landscape actors via discursive (social participation) and material (reification) practices. However, deferring to the expertise of these landscape actors emerged as a difficult, complex experience of meaning-making for CIOs due to the diverse specialisations, interests, and motivations of landscape actors. 

First, landscape architects were typically motivated by commercial incentives in their attempts to contribute to CIOs’ derived meanings and thus were dependent on persuasive narratives which in turn CIOs perceived as pre-packaged, generic, and lacking contextual validity. Second, landscape brokers portrayed roles of ‘objective conduits’ in the landscape of practice and thus strived to institutionalise meanings by promulgating standardised ideal-type methodologies, models, and other ‘truthful’ intellectual resources. Third, landscape companions were being confronted by competing knowledge and discourses in the landscape similar to CIOs and thus contributed to CIOs’ meaning making based on their contextual awareness, shared sense of oneness, and productive generosity.

As a result, CIOs’ efforts of meaning-making not only encompassed efforts of cognitive and technical complexities, but it also involved much effort from CIOs to interrogate the social-political complexities present in the landscape of practice.

Overall, the findings suggest that CIOs’ endeavours to develop their strategic IT knowledge is far from an individual accomplishment. Instead, it is heavily derived from their complex social engagements with these diverse landscape actors. Therefore, while prior studies have emphasised the role of the CIO as an individual, this research has demonstrated the importance of CIOs’ embeddedness as part of a landscape of practice.