Information systems continuity process: Conceptual foundations for the study of the “social”

Organizations' value creation is dependent on the reliable and continuous operations of their inherently unreliable information systems (IS). Year after year industry and academic surveys show that IS-related incidents persist as a top concern on IS managers' agendas. While past research has addressed technological improvements and planning methodologies as a means of improving the continuity of organizational technologies (IS continuity), the “social” part - that is, the humans and their social and cognitive processes - has largely remained in the background and under researched. This current research seeks to bring to the foreground the implications of the social for IS continuity by developing conceptual foundations of the social dynamics in the IS continuity process. This study proposes a framework of IS continuity process with three phases: (1) preparing for incidents; (2) coping with and mitigating the impact of incidents; and (3) recovering from incidents. Implications of and potential theoretical and conceptual foundations for the social in the IS continuity process are discussed together with their practical implications. Addressing the challenges that pertain to the management of IS continuity requires multidisciplinary approaches that broadly take use of social and cognitive theories on individual and collective levels of analysis.