La capacité d’appropriation, une capacité organisationnelle immatérielle négligée dans l’adoption des systèmes d’information et de gestion

This paper focuses on the appropriation capacity of the information and management systems (IMS). This capacity includes the ability to provide organizational support to users and to define concerted indexing rules while leaving them autonomy for their adaptation. We show that the formalization of this capacity by organizations is often overlooked when implementing these systems. We illustrate our ideas with two case studies, carried out in two French public professional bureaucracies. In both cases, we find underuses, misuses and workarounds of the IMS, related to a coercive adoption and not a real IMS appropriation. We explain these results by the fact that appropriation, and thereby the appropriation capacity, are neglected. To prevent the association of the appropriation capacity only with additional costs, we propose to integrate the appropriation capacity within the intangible assets of the organization.