Abstract
This paper focuses on local adaptations, referring to the significant or subtle changes local firms make in their local business processes and rules in order to fit with a generic application system, and to the changes they make in the features of a generic application system. Local adaptations are therefore bidirectional in nature. Although several studies stress the importance of local adaptations for the overall success of information technologies (IT) used across locations, more research is needed regarding what kind of local adaptations are required for a particular generic application system to work well in particular localities. The nature and extent of local adaptations are still poorly understood. This paper provides a concrete illustration of a historically situated local adaptation: the case of Veiling Holambra. This Brazilian cooperative has imported a generic auction marketplace model from Holland and adapted it to local conditions, to succeed in a globalized and competitive flower market. Using concepts drawn from studies on globalization, cross-cultural implementations, and IT-based organizational change literature, we put forward three propositions that help to explain the success of local adaptations. The results of our case study indicate that the immigration of Dutch people was critical for bringing knowledge of cooperative structure and flower production to Holambra and led to a relatively small design-use gap. The ability to take local, contextual requirements into account without neglecting the ‘generic’ knowledge led to the successful implementation of the generic auction model. This mutual influence was particularly enabled by the Brazilian culture of improvization.
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Notes
‘Veiling’ is the Dutch word for ‘auction’. The word ‘veiling’ is now also used in the Portuguese/Brazilian language.
The interview protocols are available upon request.
We consider the ‘Dutch’ online auction model as a generic application system for two main reasons: (1) it was primarily developed by a consortium of software and hardware suppliers and flower auctions in Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands; and (2) it has been exported, implemented and tested worldwide (e.g., Africa, Australia, Asia).
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by HEC Montreal. We thank the Veiling Holambra managers who agreed to participate in this research and Rogerio Oliveira, business consultant and MBA student at HEC Montreal, who worked as research assistant in this project. We also thank Peter van Baalen, Otto Koppius, and the JIT reviewers for their suggestions to improve this paper.
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Pozzebon, M., van Heck, E. Local adaptations of generic application systems: the case of Veiling Holambra in Brazil. J Inf Technol 21, 73–85 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jit.2000059
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jit.2000059