In times of business-driven digital transformation, increased design autonomy in innovation projects and agile principles, traditional coordination approaches in the IS domain are facing growing acceptance issues and, consequently, value contribution barriers. Since coordination challenges of IS on the enterprise level (e.g., IS complexity) persist or even increase with digitalization and design autonomy, organizations are in search of extending their portfolio beyond formal interventions. This paper integrates various descriptive and design knowledge components into a comprehensive analysis and design approach for informal coordination interventions. We cover a problem-oriented discussion of theoretical and conceptual foundations, a taxonomy of generic informal interventions, a catalogue of derived intervention types, and a process to systematically construct and evaluate situation-specific informal interventions. An Action Design Research project in a large company is summarized to demonstrate our proposal and provide evaluative evidence.

Robert Winter

Nov 2021