How Psion Got Its Groove Back: Technology Strategy in Emerging IT Industries
Jonathan Allen (Purdue University)

"The secret of our success…this is incredibly difficult to achieve…is to identify deliverable products against future, or visionary, customer needs…you’ve got to think futures."

Psion Plc has been a successful company in the highly uncertain world of handheld and mobile computing. It has transformed itself from a small British software distributor into one of the leaders of the ‘European challenge’ to Microsoft’s dominance of personal computing platforms. Psion has been successful in creating products that anticipate future uses of technology. Yet the company has also gone through difficult periods, particularly at the beginning of the 1990’s when the handheld computing industry as a whole was in a time of uncertainty and upheaval.

This paper examines Psion’s key technology strategy decisions, particularly during periods when Psion made decisions that went against the ‘conventional wisdom’ held by industry competitors and experts at the time. We will investigate how Psion thought about the future by tracing the links between the technology assumptions held by Psion as a company, and the technology assumptions prevalent in its larger industry. We will ask how Psion’s basic framing of the handheld computer problem was reinforced or challenged, and which kinds of information, analysis, or events played a role in this process.

The concept of a technological frame is a basic tool for understanding technological evolution. A technological frame is a set of problems and solutions that shape how members of a community with interests in a technology interact with each other. If we consider Psion as a technological community itself, it can be described as having elements of a strong technological frame. It has preserved a vision of small, mobile, low power information devices through the interactions of a tightly-knit group of long-standing senior managers. Yet Psion itself is but a small part of a larger technological community around handheld computers. Psion’s relationship to the dominant technological frame in the wider industry has varied from full acceptance, to reaction, and even to outright refusal. Crucially, at a time when the larger industry was convinced that ‘pen-based computers’ and ‘wireless communications devices’ were the wave of the future, Psion did not immediately release products with these features. It was able to recover, and then thrive, by distinguishing between different types of legitimate inputs to its own technology strategy process. In particular, it was able to draw upon its own early experience with technology users in a variety of situations.

The case of Psion says something about business success in highly uncertain, future oriented industries. For the growing body of research on technological change, however, it begins to outline the mechanisms through which technological frames are maintained and changed.

Financial Services & Social Exclusion: A Critical Case in the Internet Revolution
David Knights (Keele University), Faith Noble (University of Nottingham), Theo Vurdubakis and Hugh Willmott (UMIST)

In contemporary discourse, both popular and academic, there is much talk of the 'virtual organization' (Mowshowitz, 1994), the 'Cybercorp' (Martin, 1996), the 'elusive office' (Huws, Korte and Robinson, 1990). For example, we are told that 'virtual offices' (Birchall and Lyons, 1995) "will replace the large corporate office blocks which will stand only as monuments to past business philosophies ... Not a happy thought for the construction industry" (Sherman and Judkin, 1992:151). It is also anticipated that boundaries between marketplace and home will disappear as consumers view, customize, and order from home (Mitchell, 1995). Ultimately, even the factory itself "will be like a three-dimensional computer printer, capable of fabricating just about any physical object from a computer model." (Wooley, 1992:206).

Our focus in this paper is principally on how representations of technological artefacts have power effects insofar as the vision they engender is perceived as convincing to large numbers of people and, in particular, those close to the corporate purse. In theoretical terms, our argument is that the 'social' is mobilised through discursive representations of technological artefacts and their 'truth' effects. Not any old representation, so to speak, can have the effect of persuading people to believe in its vision. However, those surrounding the new micro-electronic information and communication technologies have a privileged place in the schema of representations, largely because they are seen as efficient, progressive and thereby a dominant force for the future. To the extent that people behave as if this were true, it becomes true. So, for example, we have a veritable race to buy equity stocks in the internet traders such as Amazon and Freeserve. Their valuations are therefore based not on current losses, so much as on a potential to make long-run, quasi monopolistic profits as a result of dominance in the market respectively for distributing books and internet advertising through cyberspace. These are just two examples that demonstrate the transformative power of expectations about, and representations of, technological artefacts on social action. They raise the question of the discursive role and influence of the idea of `virtuality’ (and of the technological developments that are said to make it possible, or even inevitable). Such issues, we would claim, are at the heart of a wide range of ongoing theoretical and practical debates surrounding current developments in remote trading and micro-electronic communications.

References

Birchall, D. and Lyons, D. (1995) Creating Tomorrow's Organization, London, Pitman.
Huws, U., Korte, W., and Robinson, S., (1990) Telework: Towards the Elusive Office, Chichester, Wiley.
Martin, J (1996) CYBERCORP: The New Business Revolution, New York: AMACOM.
Mitchell, W., (1995) City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn, Boston, MIT Press.
Mowshowitz, A (1994) ‘Virtual Organization: A Vision of Management in the Information Age’, The Information Society, 10/4, pp. 267-288.
Sherman, B and Judkin, P (1992) Glimpses of Heaven: Visions of Hell: Virtuality and its Implications, London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Wooley, B.,(1992) Virtual Worlds: A Journey into Hype and Hyperreality, Oxford, Basil Blackwell.

Building on the internet
Robert A. te Velde, Delft University of Technology, Dept. Systems Engineering, Policy Analysis & Management Economics of Infrastructures Group, robbinv@tbm.tudelft.nl

Field work is virtually non-existent in economic research [Smelser, 1994 #88]. While the feelings about the (im)possible rise of a ‘New Economy’ start running high these days in the field of economics [Krugman, 1997 #164; Shepard, 1997 #165], few have actually soiled their hands with bits and bytes. This article is the reflection of a rare three month field research that I conducted within a firm (hereafter ‘QED’) that sells information on the building and construction market. The case study is part of a bigger economic research program on the e-commercialisation of the construction market.

The structure of the article follows the development and actual implementation of a design for a firm-wide IT-infrastructure that is meant to propel QED into the era of e-commerce (‘the Brain’; ‘the IT-room’; ‘the Firm’; ‘the Market’). Technological trajectories are usually much more complex than this linear description makes us believe [Rip, 1998 #167] but I found this simple structure the most insightful way to unroll the story. The basic idea of the system – that dynamically generated webpages from several databases – was that the difference between internal and external users is artificial and is entirely based on differences in authorisation. I also stressed flexibility in the design: webpages would be made on-the-fly and tailored to the individual needs of the user.

The proposal was accepted and QED let me and a student come over. Yet we were moved to the attic (‘the IT room’) – at safe distance from the employees downstairs that kept working on the old system while we started building a new system. Probably due to the relatively isolated position (…) several major misunderstandings occurred between the top management us. They were especially startled by the span of control of the system, that reached up until the personal (sic!) computers of the external users.

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