The paper “Achieving Effective Use when Digitalizing Work - The Role of Representational Complexity“  by Jens Lauterbach, Benjamin Mueller, Felix Kahrau and Alexander Maedche has been accepted for publication in Management Information Systems Quarterly.  

The editorial objective of the MIS Quarterly (https://www.misq.org/) is the enhancement and communication of knowledge concerning the development of IT-based services, the management of IT resources, and the use, impact, and economics of IT with managerial, organizational, and societal implications. MISQ is the leading journals in the Information Systems discipline, its five-year impact factor is 9.608.

Summary:
In times of accelerated digital transformation, many organizations still struggle to put enterprise systems to effective us e quickly. While prior work suggests either system or task complexity as a source for these difficulties, this case study of a major system implementation at a European bank reveals the most important source to be the complexity arising from co-dependency between the system and the task . We conceptualize this co-dependency as inherent in system -enabled tasks by proposing system dependency (the extent to which a task is supported by a system) and semantic dependency (the degree to which semantic understanding is required for tas k completion). Together, these dependencies create representational complexity, which constrains users from achieving effective use in system -enabled tasks and ca n explain differences in achieving effective use through variations in learning effort. The concepts and insights emerging from this study provide researchers and practitioners with a deeper understanding of what complexity means and why, in some contexts , learning how to use systems effectively takes longer.