Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
1
Submission for the Critical Perspectives in Accounting 2020 Conference
Working towards Pictures:
A Field Study on Crafting Dashboards
February 2020
Working paper
Marc Feldmann
WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management
Institute of Management Accounting and Control (IMC)
Lukas Löhlein*
WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management
Institute of Management Accounting and Control (IMC)
Utz Schäffer
WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management
Institute of Management Accounting and Control (IMC)
* Corresponding author.
2
Working towards Pictures:
A Field Study on Crafting Dashboards
Abstract
This paper is based on a longitudinal case study in a leading global technology company. It
analyzes how actors mobilize visuals and visualizing to deal with problematic issues they en-
counter during the development of a digital dashboard. We draw on semi-structured interviews,
observations of project meetings, and documentary evidence to show how the situated uses of
visual technologies and processes of visualizing shape discourses and actions during the devel-
opment process and, as a consequence, the dashboard. We find that visualizing is used in dif-
ferent ways to alleviate or circumvent absences, incompleteness and other imperfections during
inscribing. We use our findings to elaborate on the role of such ‘negatives’ in inscribing and
their interplay with visualizing. We examine four modes, imagination, apportionment, reifica-
tion and adjournment, in which visualizing is employed by actors to translate substantial and
transformational negatives during inscribing. We thereby contribute to the discussion of ac-
counting inscriptions and reveal that notions such as absence, incompleteness, or inaccuracy
are all part of a broader analytical category, namely the negative. We further make a case for
moving from studying inscriptions to studying inscribing in accounting, and thereby strengthen
the link between the study of accounting inscriptions and one of the core tenets of Latour’s
Science in Action: to examine the black boxes of knowledge production before they become
stable.
Keywords: accounting inscriptions, visualization, translation, actor-network theory
3
1. Introduction
In recent years, an array of technological advances, often referred to in its entirety as ‘digitali-
zation’, has enhanced organizational capabilities to visualize accounting and accounts. Re-
searchers are increasingly studying this shift from analogous to digital technologies and its im-
plications for the way firms visualize accounting and organizing. Such visualizing goes beyond
mere representation of information – it also makes interfaces between physical and virtual re-
alities operational and much more immediate. While literature has addressed the role of visuals
in the representation of accounting figures (Busco & Quattrone, 2015; Qu & Cooper, 2011;
Quattrone, 2009, 2017) and in strategizing (Eppler & Platts, 2009; Kaplan, 2011), we argue that
there is potential for expanding the conversation to encompass the roles that negatives and vis-
ualizing play in the development of accounting inscriptions. The way accounting inscriptions
are shaped can have strong implications as to how they can be used to enact control in distant
organizational contexts. It is thus surprising that their construction seems to be a much less
researched subject than the use and relative configuration of control concepts (e.g. Bedford et
al., 2016; Demartini & Otley, 2019; Grabner & Moers, 2013; Malmi & Brown, 2008) they
instantiate. With this paper, we want to make the case for a stronger incorporation of processual
perspectives into research on accounting representations.
We tell the story of a dashboard development project from ‘picture to picture’. Between
those pictures, or versions of the dashboard, a group of individuals explicates, scrutinizes and
integrates knowledge from different domains of expertise to stabilize an inscription-in-the-mak-
ing. We explore the role of inscribing as a visual activity and follow in real-time actors during
the manifestation of an accounting inscription in the form of a digital dashboard1. We witness
firsthand a series of creative, visually mediated efforts that, despite a series of problematic cir-
cumstances, finally effect the emergence of a functional version of the dashboard. While prior
studies on accounting change have often treated inscriptions as a given, those who examine
specifics of the inscription building process have not appreciated negatives as a category in its
own right. Although the negative is referenced (Busco & Quattrone, 2018, p. 18), there is less
attention devoted to how it encompasses qualities of both inscriptions and inscribing that are
flawed, incomplete, undesirable or absent.
From that starting point, we examine the interplay of visualizing with negatives and how
it shapes the making of a new inscription. While negatives intuitively seem to run contrary to
1 In this paper, we refer to electronic reports with high representational density of uncertainty-reducing information
in predominantly graphical form as digital dashboards.
4
stable inscriptions, prior studies of inscribing processes point to different directions regarding
the nature of their influence on inscribing. We therefore ask: How do actors use visualizing to
deal with negatives in inscribing? In engaging with this question, we correspond to recent calls
to further inquire about the notion of stability and its relation to “the possibilities for accounting
to ‘represent’ and ‘intervene’” (Robson & Bottausci, 2018, p. 72).
Much in the spirit of Latour’s Science in Action, some scholars have made initial at-
tempts to open the black box of inscription building and understand the practices and devices
used to inscribe. Still, as some have already pointed out, further inquiry into the procedural
specifics of inscribing is needed. Calls to investigate the “process of metaphorical production”
(Robson, 1992, p. 704) concern, for instance, the study of visual interaction (Quattrone, 2017),
the context of the introduction of new inscriptions (Ezzamel, Lilley & Willmott, 2004), its spe-
cific circumstances (Qu & Cooper, 2011) and finally the role of digital technologies and the
influence of the visuals they produce (Yakura, 2013). We follow these calls and, mindful of
Robson’s (1992) reflection that knowledge is “an outcome of the practical procedures of in-
scription, of the technologies for inscribing the world” (p. 689), we highlight in this paper the
technologies that mediate social activities involved in inscribing. Following Latour’s call to
examine things before they become fixed and opaque, we investigate the instable, interim, im-
perfect states of an inscription-in-the-making and, in line with other practice-oriented studies
of inscriptions (such as Dambrin & Robson, 2011), we follow “the best of all guides” (Latour,
1987, p. 21) – the actors creating and using them. We thereby contribute to the literature in two
ways.
First, our findings suggest that the negative is underappreciated in prior studies on the
translation of new accounting inscriptions. We call for a turn from studying inscriptions to stud-
ying inscribing and for more appreciation of the processual specifics and the broader context in
which nascent inscriptions emerge. We show that the category of transformational negatives
has been largely overlooked by studies focusing on inscriptions as fixed-state objects. Second,
we reveal imagination, apportionment, reification and adjournment as four modes of visualiz-
ing that interplay with substantial and transformational negatives, allowing actors to alleviate,
circumvent or mobilize them in inscribing. Third, we provide an account of intra-professional
collaboration. As many before have argued, “accounting” is a specific way of seeing and know-
ing about the world which supposes a certain type of expert professional, “the accountant, as
the central figure where receipts meet, sums are added up, and balances are calculated” (Korn-
berger, Pflueger & Mouritsen, 2017, p. 92). Our case allows us following the dynamics that
5
unfold between an assemblage of actors with distinct professional backgrounds and expertise;
the management accountant, the software developer, dashboards users and others. In this way,
we shed light on the multifaceted processes of creating accounting knowledge that draws on
and draws in a variety of organizational actors (Goretzki & Messner, 2019).
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. In section 2, we outline the theoret-
ical framework. We adopt a process perspective to emphasize the dynamics of inscribing. In
section 3, we describe our research methods and the empirical data. In section 4, we present the
case narrative, which is divided into two phases. In section 5, we discuss our findings by focus-
ing attention on negatives and visualizing. We conclude in section 6 by providing suggestions
for future research.
2. Theoretical background
Actor-network theory has been, and remains to be, influential in scholarly discussions of ac-
counting representation (Justesen & Mouritsen, 2011; Robson & Bottausci, 2018). Bruno
Latour’s Science in Action (1987), written as a methodological compendium for the examina-
tion of process of scientific ‘fact’-production, has provided several analytical concepts that have
proven useful for learning about accounting, a discipline itself much concerned with the pro-
duction of ‘knowledge’. Among these analytical concepts, studying accounting through the lens
of “action at a distance” has particularly appealed to accounting researchers. This is hardly
surprising: Latour’s discussion of “centres of calculation” – entities remote from and alien to
locations in which they are, for some reason, interested – become familiar with the conditions
residing beyond the distance. Unhindered by their own local absence, those in the centres are
able to act upon these remote places. How do they become familiar? For Latour, there is an
element capable of overcoming the distance, one that is “forcing the world to come to the cen-
tres” (p. 233): “inscriptions”.
Robson (1992) introduced inscriptions into accounting as “material and graphical rep-
resentations that constitute the accounting report” (p. 685) and as a “material translation of any
setting that is to be acted upon” (p. 691). This suggests broad and fundamental relevance of the
concept, testified by inscriptions permeating almost all matters of accounting in organizations.
Inscriptions shape the ways individuals and collectives think, talk and act in relation to that
which inscriptions account for – and at times even more so due to that which accounts are silent
on. Distant contexts – individuals, activities, rationales, circumstances – are translated into an
accounting inscription, which can travel to centers of calculation in order to establish
6
knowledge about distant affairs. Actors in the center can act upon those remote from the center.
Thinking about inscriptions as explanations for distant contexts to become ‘known’ raises ques-
tions as to what makes a good explanation. Following the idea of action at a distance, inscrip-
tions are the “one element” that “may ’replace’, ‘represent’, ‘stand for’ all the others, which are
in effect made secondary, deducible, subservient or negligible”. This explaining of distant con-
texts establishes “a general feeling of strength” (Latour, 1988, p. 158).
In the accounting literature, one understanding of inscriptions that became particularly
pronounced acknowledges the performative nature of their signs and symbols (Callon, 2007).
Seeing inscriptions as never being just an inscription, never just representing, this understand-
ing goes far beyond conceptualizing their functioning as merely showing and describing ready-
made organizational realities. Much more, it expands towards an appreciation of inscriptions’
capacities to perform, shape or, at the extreme, dominate these realities. Acknowledging that
accounting inscriptions can, in fact, act upon realities, has strong implications for their study.
Moving beyond a mere representational understanding of accounting numbers, figures and
other manuscripts, opens up avenues for thinking about inscriptions in more instrumental terms.
Acquitted from being scribbles on a paper, they become artefacts consciously designed to serve
certain purposes.
Since Robson’s seminal paper, several works have investigated the nature of accounting
inscriptions and their relation to the social, especially their emergence and potential to change
accounting and accounts in organizations. Action at a distance can manifest in organizations in
a multitude of ways, and thus allow inscriptions to influence organizational life through a vari-
ety of mechanisms. As rhetorical machines (Busco & Quattrone, 2015), discourse mediators
(Jordan, Mitterhofer & Jørgensen, 2018; Themsen & Skærbæk, 2018), or as devices for the
translation of practices (Ezzamel et al., 2004), enrollment and coordination (Yakura, 2013), or
sustainability management (Corvellec, Ek, Zapata & Zapata Campos, 2018), inscriptions facil-
itate intervention (Dambrin & Robson, 2011), engagement (Martinez & Cooper, 2019) and help
promote knowledge claims (Qu & Cooper, 2011) during the implementation of performance
measurement. Several studies have drawn on the notions of mobility, stability and combinabil-
ity to explain how inscriptions became powerful and action at a distance possible, or why they
fail to do so. In the following, we provide a brief review of the previous thinking on accounting
inscriptions which we complement in this paper.
7
2.1. Inscriptions as strong explanations
An inscription makes for a “strong explanation” (Latour, 1988, p. 159) when it incorporates
mobility, stability and combinability (Latour, 1987; Robson, 1992). These properties allow in-
scriptions to travel easily across distances to the center, resist manipulation, and convince peo-
ple. They possess isomorphic structures in the sense that a center can aggregate the knowledges
retrieved from the many distant contexts inscriptions represent. When these qualities are pre-
sent, inscriptions enable the few to act upon the distant many, separating social, economic and
political realms into ‘heres’ and ‘theres’ – a dynamic which is potentially problematic both from
functionalist and critical perspectives on accounting. Existing studies point to conditions that
shape the qualities influencing the explanatory capacities of inscriptions.
From his analysis of early historic accounting documents, Quattrone (2009) concludes
that a systematic ordering of certain types of accounts and numbers provides practical guidance
as to how to navigate information and relate it to each other. It is argued here that accounting
inscriptions are able to do so because they direct, and at the same time, grant freedom to ob-
servers to digress from paths implicated in the document. Such implicit structures foster reada-
bility and, more broadly, understandability of inscriptions. Further, their physical configura-
tions aid in relating, contextualizing, and comparing information to help users of inscriptions
to establish links between bits of information and derive new knowledge about distant contexts.
We see this, for example, in a study conducted by Corvellec et al. (2018) on efforts of the City
of Goteborg to increase sustainability in waste management. Here, the inclusion and relative
positioning of certain types of information in waste-collection invoices, namely costs and
weight, changed the notion of distance between the actors invested in the waste management
system, and invoked an increased feeling of environmental responsibility. From this case we
learn that inscriptions cannot only bridge distance by travelling faster, but also by manipulating
the distance itself.
In her study of accounting change, Chua (1995) examines the implementation of a new
accounting system in a consortium of public Australian hospitals. In this study, a newly intro-
duced costing model became powerful by fulfilling the criteria of a strong explanation. First,
consuming very little physical storage, it was “extremely mobile and relatively immutable” (p.
129), allowing it to travel through time and space with ease. Second, its underlying logic was
consistent but adaptable to the realities of the different hospitals in which it was deployed. Fi-
nally, among other properties, the model allowed to combine a large number of records and
8
reduce them to a representation that staff could interact with on screen. By these qualities, in-
scriptions tied together different interests in an acting network.
Quattrone & Hopper (2005) illustrate in their study that different ideologies, enacted
during implementations of the same ERP system in two multi-national organizations, can radi-
cally change prevailing notions of accounting and control. In the extreme case, they can effect
dissolution of calculative centers and action at a distance altogether. In one of the two organi-
zations, due to wide diffusion of access rights to the accounting system, “everyone became a
potential ‘accountant’” (p. 757). Thus, accounting inscriptions became hypermobile and thus
uncontrollable from the headquarter. This illustrates that technology can facilitate the emer-
gence of multiple and shifting loci of control. The authors thus call on ANT-inspired accounting
studies to not rigidly follow the idea of one center of calculation but instead be open to acentric
notions of control.
Hanseth & Monteiro (1997) find in their study of the Norwegian health information
infrastructure that size and complexity of a surrounding actor-network as well as the alignment
with that network influence how well inscriptions explain the distant contexts translated by
them. This shows that studies of strong explanations have to expand their focus beyond the
properties of the explanation itself to the environmental context into which it is embedded. This
is also suggested by Wouters & Sandholzer (2018), who find in their study of the introduction
of a management accounting standard in the semiconductor industry that industry standards can
make calculations adaptable to local specifics without undermining inscription’s stability, mo-
bility, or combinability. Further, Martinez & Cooper (2019), following a network of organiza-
tions assembling a performance and management system, add that inscriptions, by their inter-
linking, accumulate capabilities that help perform calculative properties of the performance
system.
From these works, we are encouraged to, with due diligence, refine and reconsider some
of the analytical tools that ANT has to offer, and adapt them to the domain of accounting. While
the structures of inscriptions are of relevance by themselves, we should look beyond and take
into consideration the conditions and relations within the network into which they are embed-
ded. This includes the technological means for visualization.
9
2.2. Inscriptions and visuals
Visualizing technologies, either digital or analogous, allow to combine even larger and more
diverse masses of knowledge than writings and thereby facilitate the creation of “nth-order in-
scriptions” (Robson, 1992, p. 701). This can significantly potentiate inscriptions’ performative
facilities, chain-translating whole landscapes of distant organizational affairs and bringing
them, reduced and condensed, back to the center. Tapping into the potential of visuals and visual
technologies for rendering inscriptions, scholars addressing performative aspects of inscriptions
have increasingly shifted their attention to the “format and furniture” (Pollock & D’Adderio,
2012) of inscriptions.
Drawing on studies in rhetoric, Quattrone (2017) shows the importance of images in
accounting inscriptions for generating knowledge in organizations and engaging actors in dis-
cussion of the information they convey. Busco & Quattrone (2015), studying the implementa-
tion of a balanced scorecard in an oil and gas corporation, find that users use systems of signs
to relate different organizational elements to each other and thereby create dynamic and coher-
ent stories. The “topology of the ordered method” (Quattrone, 2009, p. 112), such as the orient-
ing categories of the balanced scorecard, provide them with frames of reference to structure
their thinking and doing. Both studies call for further examination of visual accounting inscrip-
tions and their role in knowledge generation, construction of organizational reality and behav-
ioral implications of the ways of visualizing.
Qu & Cooper’s (2011) study deals with a balanced scorecard developed by consultants in a
client firm. When their proposal is encountered with doubt, they mobilize visuals to defend it.
The implementation still fails, and we learn from this case that the enrollment of actors with
local knowledge is required to create a strong and convincing inscription. Graphical inscrip-
tions, and the inscription devices used to construct them, are not capable of speaking for them-
selves and convincing people merely by their existence.
In a recent study, Themsen & Skærbæk (2018) emphasize the performativity of methods
and technologies for risk management in a Danish public construction project. In their study, a
digital visualizing technology established the constraints within which risk consultants and
other project members could practice the construction of risk, and thereby facilitated the order-
ing of existing knowledge and the elicitation of new knowledge. Risk consultants, invested in
the outcome of the process, changed inscriptions’ “fields, categories and maps” (p. 30) to con-
trol the course of discussion.
10
The role of visual inscriptions, however, is not necessarily static and can change over time.
Examining the use of PowerPoint over the course of an information systems project in a bank,
Yakura (2013) found that at the beginning of the project, visuals were “fictional; at best” (p.
274). and, that way, useful for engaging and enrolling actors into the project. Eventually, as the
project progressed, visuals became more specific and effected an actual coordination of activi-
ties within the project. Moreover, beyond changing specific work practices or activities, in-
scriptions can, when installed as a system, effect even more comprehensive change. Ezzamel
et al. (2004) find that arrays of written and visual inscriptions can even effect changes in the
rationale of whole organizations. In their study of a business unit of a British manufacturer,
signs, process charts, and maps crowded the shopfloor and changed existing practices; the vis-
uals created a metaphor which led to a depersonalization of knowledge and the mobilization of
certain actors to establish a new economic rationale in the organization.
Overall, studies suggest that visuals and visualizing not only take a leading role in the
design of representational aspects of inscriptions but, more importantly, are central in the emer-
gence of performativity. Visuals have transformative potential, especially when they are ac-
companied by a coordinated interplay of auxiliary technologies and human agency, either of
creative or rhetorical nature.
2.3. Inscriptions and negatives
Inscriptions do not either perform or represent. Moreover, the former is not only accomplished
through the latter. Complex and often entangled forces such as human agency, institutional
changes, emerging technologies, or mere chance can mediate what inscriptions accomplish in
the world. This implies, as noted early on by Robson (1992), “that the effects created by the use
of accounting inscriptions as a medium of control may not be the ones intended.” (p. 702). We
see related to these unintended effects a theme that has started to increasingly receive attention
in studies of accounting inscriptions. Some scholars, instead of restricting themselves to the
phenomena that are positively observable in and around inscriptions, have started addressing
those aspects that are flawed, incomplete or altogether absent. These might be best referred to
as the “negative” (Busco & Quattrone, 2018, p. 18) – a set of relative qualities perceived as
opposite, different, counteractive, antinomic, inverse, or non-positive in any other regard. Qual-
ifiers for this category are, of course, not absolutes and do not exist a-perspectively. They in-
stead depend on the realities of certain actors and their positioning in a network. Negatives in
inscriptions and inscribing have, given the richness and complexity of the contexts of inscrib-
ing, a strong empirical presence, if not one dominating that of positives. Accordingly, they have
11
potential to influence action and discourse of individuals and technologies that are significantly
involved in inscribing significantly. The presence of negatives around accounting inscriptions
leaves spaces for “the user to colonise” (Quattrone, 2009, p. 104). Acknowledging negatives
follows from our understanding of the reality inscriptions are bound to render as radically in-
determinate.
The open-endedness in interpretation that comes with the negative in and around in-
scriptions also implies the potential to disturb the very properties that make them strong, or the
agendas of their advocates. We can observe this, for instance, in Qu & Cooper (2011), where
the absence of users during development of a balanced scorecard, and the absence of human
supporters in defending it, made an inscription which failed to convince. This is in line with
Quattrone (2017), who states that a representation “requires a community for it to work” (p.
604). In Lowe & Koh (2007), accountants started problematizing the credibility of reporting
documents in their company. This shifted attention to the black boxes of production of docu-
ments in the firm, including their own accounting reports. The following loss of opacity
“opened their own black boxes to scrutiny” (p. 970), and weakened their position in the net-
work. In a third case, one about sourcing by the Danish Defense Force, Christensen, Skærbæk
& Tryggestad (2019) find that accounting inscriptions can dynamically perform a variety of
roles. Lacking faithfulness, they can undermine the ambitions of their proponents when they
travel between parties following competing agendas. Wouters & Sandholzer (2018) further find
that the absence of standards can complicate the translation of a strong inscription.
However, another series of studies suggests that negatives, especially manifested as im-
perfect representation, are not only harmless, but in fact quite functional. Studying the inscrip-
tion of sales representatives in the pharmaceutical industry, Dambrin & Robson (2011) find an
absence of strong ties between inscriptions and that which they translate. To individuals who
have to consult these inscriptions, it is not obvious how they relate to their realities. However,
in this case, the opacity and ambivalence of inscriptions makes people trust them. Even more,
actors become bricoleurs who fall back on an assemblage of systems and reports, and who
enroll themselves in incumbent performance measures. In another case investigated by Andon,
Baxter & Chua (2007), a group of actors fails to arrive at a stable set of performance measure-
ment metrics. The authors trace this back to weak ties within the actor-network. However, they
find that the unstable metrics were functional in that they sparked conversation within the net-
work and emphasized notions of coordination which were important for the advancement of a
12
change agenda. A series of further studies find that inaccuracy (Jordan, Mitterhofer & Jørgen-
sen, 2018) and incompleteness (Busco & Quattrone, 2015, 2018; Quattrone, 2017; Martinez &
Cooper, 2019) in accounting representations foster engagement of users, drawing them into
discussion about alternative interpretations, and making them digress and inquire about things
beyond those that are represented.
How do these two rather different perspectives on the role of negatives fit together? The
quite different outcomes related to negatives in these studies make us call for an inquiry of the
mechanisms that make negatives either functional or dysfunctional. How are they involved in
the becoming of strong explanations? Not without reason, Busco & Quattrone (2015) call for
researching the “absences, silence, incompleteness” in inscriptions. Yet questions such as the
ones we pose have so far been left unanswered. Prior studies have largely focused on the neg-
ative in those properties that give rise to an inscription’s substance and identity and make them
what and how they are, and which one might therefore want to refer to as substantial negatives.
Substantiality here does not have to be restricted to a material understanding and discussions of
representational absences, missing content, flawed semantics or inaccurate measures. All these
are valid analytical categories in themselves. But it is not only databases, signs and symbols on
screen or paper that determine the nature of inscriptions and their ductus in explaining distant
worlds but also allocated meanings and interpretive contexts.
Especially regarding all that which surrounds inscriptions and which, as part of these
surroundings, deviates from a perceived ideal, we believe there is much more for us to learn
about. Given their influence, and here we once more venture beyond prior discussion, negatives,
as an analytical concept, should not only be applied to inscriptions but, much broader, to in-
scribing. We see no a priori reason for a privileged appreciation of the imperfections of artefacts
over their generative conditions. We suspect that, somewhere beyond inscriptions, there might
be an additional facet to the notion of negatives. Conceptually prior to the substance of inscrip-
tions are the conditions producing the substance.
As we see from these studies on strength, visuals, and negatives in accounting inscrip-
tions, the configurations of inscriptions can make performative capacities emerge. Inscriptions
are infused with the potential to shape trajectories not only of individuals, but of whole organ-
izations and industries. Understanding inscriptions as representational and performative – at the
same time reflecting organizational realities and fabricating them – leads us to questions about
the emergence of these facets. Why do they become how they become? In quest for an answer
13
to such questions, we call for a turn towards inscribing. What are the circumstances of inscrip-
tions’ emergence, the forces shaping them? Which role do visuals play herein? How do actors,
remote and foreign to each other, become close and enrolled in their conception? How are those
ties established and strengthened that “link the representatives to what they speak for” (Latour,
1987, p. 79)? Why do they, during their construction, become silent on some things and not on
others?
Scholars in other disciplines have elaborated on some of the advantages that process
studies have to offer (Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas & Van de Ven, 2013). These include, among
others, the centrality of time and the appreciation of rich contexts. In this regard, they are very
close to core ideas put forward in Science in Action:
“By themselves, a statement, a piece of machinery, a process are lost. By looking only
at them and at their internal properties, you cannot decide if they are true or false,
efficient or wasteful, costly or cheap, strong or frail. These characteristics are only
gained through incorporation into other statements, processes and pieces of machinery.”
(Latour, 1987, p. 29).
In this spirit, our case takes a more processual perspective, emphasizing the temporal
and other dynamics of inscribing. Paying close attention to actors’ actions and communications,
we attend to the forces at play at the broader site of inscribing. Thus, in addition to adding to a
discussion of visualizing, we also put forward an in depth study of accounting as a social prac-
tice (Ahrens & Chapman, 2007; Hopwood & Miller, 1994; Robson & Bottausci, 2018).
3. Research design
3.1. Case background
This paper is based on a case study at Analytics, a central department within our case firm
SoftCo2. SoftCo is a multinational software corporation that produces and markets standard
software for integrated business solutions worldwide. It operates in over 100 countries and em-
ploys more than 90,000 people. Within Analytics, we follow a project in which actors from
different departments inscribe a digital dashboard for one of SoftCo’s business units. We con-
sider this a valuable case for learning about digital inscriptions for two reasons. First, SoftCo is
a leading global technology company. Its products regularly claim significant market shares;
the technologies they prototypically employ – including those auxiliary to the inscription of
new dashboards – have the potential to diffuse across hundreds of thousands of customers and
2 Due to confidentiality agreements, we anonymize the case company, titles, employee and product names.
14
shape operations of entire industries. Second, Analytics is still a relatively new unit within
SoftCo. Organizational structures that had been reshuffled by recent major organizational
changes are still in the process of resettling. This provides us with a chance to observe the
machineries of knowledge production in motion.
Until 2015, SoftCo had a large number of employees in decentral reporting teams. These
employees’ reporting practices were largely disconnected from each other and in an uncoordi-
nated fashion. Actors often used vernacular business terminology and eclectically queried an
assemblage of databases to produce reports for managers in their respective units. This was
acceptable for decentral middle managers who were primarily concerned with affairs within the
borders of their own organizational unit. However, top managers accountable for the perfor-
mance of multiple units required aggregated decision-bases. For these top managers, the lack
of a coherent firm-level reporting governance led to severe uncertainty in strategic decision-
making. The need for a proper organizational response grew. This need was perceived not only
by members of the top management team, but also by a small group of individuals residing in
mentioned decentral reporting teams who had been lobbying for change already for a longer
period of time. In a moment of particularly strong uncertainty, SoftCo’s top management team
mandated these people to initiate change. They started to screen the organization for staff that
could be classified as performing reporting activities or handling master data. In two waves of
change, more than 400 employees were moved into a new organizational sub-unit – “Analyt-
ics”. Responsibilities, hierarchies, and role interpretations involved in such an episode of
change took time to fall into place. Enactments of normative processes and patterns of social
interaction were still consolidating and adapting during our observation period. This rendered
us with the chance to “go from final products to production, from 'cold' stable objects to 'warm-
er' and unstable ones.” (Latour, 1987, p. 21).
In 2018, CloudOps, a business unit within SoftCo, approached Analytics. Local top man-
agement complained that the service portfolio for which they were accountable lacked trans-
parency. At the same time, some service managers within CloudOps complained about a lack
of transparency of the operational performance of their managed services; some also had prob-
lems with effort required to manually handle data to produce stable accounting figures. Analyt-
ics was thus asked to develop a new digital dashboard. This dashboard should automate the
process of retrieving accounting figures and decreasing management uncertainty. However, af-
ter an initial assessment, Analytics deemed the project unfeasible. Data would need to be re-
trieved from remote locations within SoftCo’s system landscape, which were not sufficiently
15
connected. It could not travel to a single location where it could be consumed by the dashboard
automatically. Consequently, the chances of delivering a successful project were considered
low and the request was rejected. At the beginning of 2019, another team in Analytics decided
to accept the project which then, throughout the year, unfolded in two phases. In the first phase,
representatives of Analytics and CloudOps met to establish a common understanding of
CloudOps’ requirements, as well as the experts and technologies which needed to be involved.
Discussions revolved around the development of a common picture – in the most literal sense
– of the final dashboard. In the second phase, a series of experts were employed to build the
dashboard according to the vision established in the first phase.
3.2. Data collection
The paper draws on data collected between December 2018 and November 2019. We rely on a
triangulation research methodology (Denzin, 2009; Lincoln & Guba, 1985) involving three
main data sources – qualitative in-depth interviews, direct observation of meetings, and docu-
mentary evidence – to provide insights on the formation, development, and final construction
of a digital dashboard (see figure 1).
We conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with individuals from multiple functions
and hierarchy levels within SoftCo. The interviews lasted between thirty minutes and two hours,
with an average length of one hour. Most interviews were conducted in person by the first
author, with some exceptions where videoconferencing software was used to talk to people in
distant locations. All interviews were transcribed verbatim. During interviews, we asked open-
ended questions about the emerging characteristics of different technologies and the methodol-
ogy employed by Analytics; we asked how technical structures and services were developed;
we also asked how coordination within Analytics and between different departments unfolded
during the dashboard’s production process. Interviewees described in rich detail their role and
experience within the design and production process, their perceptions of the dashboard’s day-
to-day use, and their interactions with digital dashboards.
These formal interviews were supplemented with discussions and informal conversa-
tions with actors in our case. One important actors was the gatekeeper, Simon. Simon is a mem-
ber of Analytics and has a role as ‘analytical owner’ which, he describes, organizes “the link
between the business – that is, from the business requirement – and the translation to develop-
ment”. During the six years prior to taking over this role, Simon was a management accountant
at SoftCo with a focus on income statements. According to Simon, he "built cockpits myself,
16
but on PowerPoints that look as if [management] was moving through the internet and clicking
through in real time”. With Simon, we built a personal relationship with a key figure in the
field. This put us in a position of trust and enabled us to gain access to meetings, internal doc-
uments, and email exchanges. Informal conversations that we had were not recorded but have
been documented in field notes (Emerson et al. 2011).
To bring an “ethnographic sensibility” (Star, 1999, p. 383) to the data collection and
analysis, we supplemented our interviews with direct observations of 53 meetings. These in-
cluded primarily dashboard project meetings and discussions with subject matter experts such
as management accountants, software developers, and other technical experts. Observations
took place over nine months. Each meeting involved groups of up to seven people and, on
average, lasted around 30 minutes. We were part of three recurring appointments taking place
weekly or biweekly. During these meetings, actors discussed emerging issues (often of tech-
nical nature), caught up on the status of activities, and aligned on how to go forward with the
project. We took notes in or directly after observations, recording and transcribing verbatim
more significant observations, such as a lengthy workshops. The continuity that came with this
series of observations rendered us with a rather coherent and comprehensive impression of phe-
nomena, allowing us to perceive dynamics that cannot unfold within one meeting, but over
many. We thereby partly overcome the alienation of phenomena from their temporal context,
which usually accompanies more sporadic modes of observation (Czarniawska, 2004). Partici-
pating in these meetings allowed us to immerse ourselves in the Analytics’ culture and broader
networks. It allowed us to gain an insider’s view of the collective decision making processes,
access informal interchanges, and foster an inductive understanding of actors’ perceptions and
world views (Adler & Adler, 1987).
Recurring meetings were conducted virtually. In the virtual meetings, the names of the
researchers were displayed on screen and visible to participants. Although we cannot com-
pletely rule out that the observed interaction was impacted by our presence, we took a non-
interfering role in our observations and did not feel our digital presence was an influential fac-
tor. Agendas, presentation slides, minutes, and supporting information of these meetings were
also collected as supplementary evidence (figure 1).
We were further able to gain access to around 100 internal documents, including organ-
izational charts of Analytics and other departments, email exchanges within the project team,
17
strategy papers on Analytics’ self-understanding and role within SoftCo, methodological guide-
lines on how new dashboards should be developed, intermediary results of workshops such as
dashboard mock-ups, and other reports.
Figure 1. Data sources.
We used these documents to triangulate our data (Flick 1992), discover unknowns in the em-
pirical landscape, and inform our interviews. Descriptive and reflective field notes taken during
site visits complement our data.
3.3. Data analysis
The following outlines how we translated our data into the narrative we present in the findings.
Through our abductive mode of reasoning, data collection and analysis ran in parallel, rather
than sequential order (Lukka, 2014).
Jan Apr Jul Oct
Jan Apr Jul Oct
Observations
(n = 53, 35:54h)
of dashboard meetings and workshops
Semi-structured interviews
(n = 20, 23:18h)
with individuals from various hierarchical levels and functions
directly or indirectly involved in building the dashboard in inscribing.
Oct-19Apr-19 Jul-19Jun-19 Jul-19 Sep-19May-19 Oct-19Aug-19May-19 Jun-19Mar-19 Jul-19Jun-19Jun-19 Nov-19Apr-19 Sep-19Aug-19Jul-19Jun-19 Jul-19 Nov-19Oct-19Jul-19 Aug-19Jun-19 Oct-19Oct-19Oct-19 Oct-19Sep-19Sep-19 Oct-19Apr-19 Sep-19Aug-19Aug-19 Sep-19Jul-19 Sep-19Jun-19May-19 Jul-19Mar-19 Sep-19
Documentary evidence
(n = 102), e.g.
dashboard building guidelines of Analytics
strategy whitepapers
photographs of visual work (e.g. flipcharts, sticky notes, dasbhoard mock-ups)
e-mail communications of project team
Apr-19 May-19 Sep-19Jan-19 Sep-19Mar-19 Jun-19May-19Mar-19 Apr-19 Aug-19Jul-19Mar-19 Jun-19 Jul-19Jul-19 Sep-19Jun-19Feb-19Dec-18 Mar-19 May-19Apr-19
Nov-19Nov-19Nov-19Nov-19Nov-19Nov-19
18
First, we began with a review of all documentary evidence and interview transcripts. This
helped develop a narrative about the way the dashboard was designed and developed. Revisiting
each observation record of project meetings, we analyzed our summarizing notes for aspects of
the dashboard which were being discussed as well as plans for how the team wanted to move
forward with the project. The resulting narrative was reviewed with an informant who was pre-
sent during nearly every activity within the case’s timeframe. Constructing this thick descrip-
tion (Geertz, 1973), we saw patterns emerging in the form of dichotomies and dynamics. These
included, for instance, the dynamically changing relative dominance of notions of sustainability
and expediency, or of methodological and functional expertise among the project team, changes
in the maturity of the tool, convergence of understandings, and an increasing explication of
implicit knowledge and assumptions. This helped us make sense of temporal and logical links
within the network of actors, events and circumstances, gauge their relative strength and de-
velop and refine explanatory ideas for observed phenomena.
Second, we reviewed our interview transcripts and field notes to develop a more detailed
understanding of the nature of inscription building’ dynamics and interactions. To investigate
the processes of inscribing, we captured those passages and episodes in which our interviewees
referred to modes of visualizing, either explicitly or implicitly. This included explanations of
visual interaction among actors during the creation of the dashboard (for instance, one inter-
viewee reflected on the use of visualization techniques in requirements elicitation), the creation
of perceptional frames that allowed seeing the world in specific ways, or how coordination and
communication between Analytics and CloudOps and other departments took place.
Through this effort, we came to realize that the empirical core of our case centers on
dynamics of visualizing within and between Analytics and CloudOps. We conceptualize in-
scribing as a process unfolding over time and approach it as a dynamic phenomenon. Unpacking
action this way allowed us to analytically delineate different stages of inscribing, each with a
specific tempo-spatial arrangement of human actors, technologies, and roles in a series of trans-
lations. We encountered several discernable states of maturity of the dashboard. To successfully
achieve state-to-state transitions, each one further infusing the nascent tool with capacity to,
upon completion, generate knowledge of distant contexts, functional and methodical compe-
tence of the involved actors needed to be mobilized and brought together within the project.
We noticed how actors made use of visuals and visualizing to facilitate interaction and accom-
plish complex tasks. The visualizing thrived on interactional dynamics within the team, which
helped resolve different understandings of the current state of the dashboard; these interactions
19
were also seen as crucial for further stabilizing the dashboard. This included the use of visual-
izing technology to immediately realize a shared vision of the inscription.
Finally, we re-examined our full data set to provide corroborating or disconfirming ev-
idence for our conclusions. This proceeded with detailed reviews of all interview notes and field
notes. To assess the consistency among our sources and provide for qualitative rigor, we cross-
examined our interpretations from documents, observations, and interviews, and juxtaposed the
results of our analysis with alternative explanations. We completed data analysis when we
reached a consensus on the interpretation of our data.
4. Findings
4.1. Enrolling the project team
In March 2019, the dashboard project started when John, senior manager and part of the
CloudOps leadership team, was asked by his unit’s top management to increase the transpar-
ency of service portfolio performance. The motivation for this was two-fold. First, more trans-
parency should enable local top management to make informed strategic decisions regarding
the design of the overall portfolio. Second, it should enable service managers to efficiently
operate the parts of this portfolio for which they were accountable. Transparency should be
established in form of a dashboard that could be used by top management and service managers
alike. To build such dashboard, John put together a project team, which included members from
different domains of expertise. On side of CloudOps, Dillan and Sarah, managers with financial
and operational foci, were asked to represent the requirements of around 100 future users within
the project. Simon was involved on the side of Analytics.
In developing the dashboard, the team did not start from scratch. In CloudOps, an Excel-
based report already existed, which had originally been created by a working student. As that
student had left and nobody since then felt responsible for the report, John thought the report
looked “like a catastrophe”, and thus unable to provide management a basis for decision-mak-
ing. However, this legacy report still had its use as a frame of reference for the project team, as
it already embodied parts of the information needs of the service manager community. As such,
it was retrieved by Simon to develop an initial idea of the key performance indicators, time
horizons and perspectives on the data, for which the future users of the dashboard would pre-
sumably have interest.
20
To also learn about the CloudOps business context, tacit knowledge, and the logics implicated
in the legacy report, Simon scheduled a meeting with Dillan. As a CloudOps manager with a
focus on cost accounting and financial performance of services, Dillan could provide Simon
with insights into the performance metrics driving the CloudOps business. Based on conversa-
tions between them, Simon used PowerPoint to create what he called a “mock-up”, a very first,
purely visual and non-functional version of the dashboard-to-be. Beyond the legacy report and
the interaction with Dillan, a key device for Simon to elicit requirements in a structured way
was what in Analytics terminology was called a “user story”. A user story is a very brief narra-
tive written by representatives of a community of future users, justifying what the users want
to use a tool for, what they want to accomplish, and which criteria exist for formally accepting
the tool as ‘successfully delivered’. The operating model of Analytics regularly demanded
every dashboard project to be based on such a story. Beyond the purpose of justifying the de-
mand for a dashboard, the story would also force users to precisely articulate their requirements
and help the analytical owner develop an initial idea. In the present case, this story mentioned
a lack of “transparency” and a “huge workload” for data handling related to the legacy reporting
as the primary motivations to develop a new solution. The story stated that the new dashboard
should “work fully system-based” and enable service managers to “steer service costs effi-
ciently”.
After drawing on these resources to arrive at an initial understanding, one of the first
Simon made in his role as analytical owner was to take stock of two things. First, he assessed
the interfaces and interdependencies of the project and the role of a variety of experts from
different domains across the organization. In doing that, Simon described the project as an ac-
tivity to “agree” on a reporting between the involved parties. Second, as detailed as possible,
Simon sought to identify the metrics, logics, and data sources that would be involved in building
the dashboard. To detangle all these elements, Simon spread them all out across a PowerPoint
slide to relate them to each other. Who might provide valuable input for the project? Which
data sources and objects would be involved? How might the timeline of the project look like?
By doing this, Simon hoped to arrive at a systematic understanding of the project and be able
to “work towards a picture”. A part of this picture was the mock-up he had created with support
of Dillan. Based on his experiences from earlier projects, Simon noted that this kind of mapping
would let “you know: where are the problems? What needs to be done yet?”:
Maybe in this mock-up again – what are the critical points now? Also: what are the actions? What needs to
be refined? This has actually always worked out quite well. Well, this is actually my method, how I proceed,
21
with the picture itself, with the whole set of KPIs and dimensions, drill-down capabilities and working di-
rectly within the picture. Like, here is point A in red, what are the next – well, to link it: what are the next
actions? And tracking. Because then you always work towards an image and you know: where are the prob-
lems, what needs to be done yet?
After drawing on Dillan’s domain expertise to construct the mock-up and thereby follow his
“method”, Simon scheduled a meeting with the CloudOps managers around John. In the “ori-
entation phase”, as he called it, the meeting’s agenda was to establish common ground between
him and the managers regarding the working methodology of the tool making team, the project
timeline, milestones, and main assumptions. He also confronted the managers with the mock-
up to trigger first content-related discussions.
The meeting started with Simon presenting his vision of the project’s set up to the man-
agers. This included the introduction of possible touchpoints of the dashboard project with other
departments or endeavors at SoftCo. This gave John, as part of the CloudOps leadership team,
having a comprehensive perspective on the activities going on at multiple hierarchical levels,
opportunity to identify together with Simon if there might be existing data sources that could
be recycled in building the dashboard. They also discussed whether on-going projects or con-
versations in the organization might have implications for the dashboard project. John also
planned to provide Simon with background information on the legacy report, including the
origin, scope, datasets, and target audience as well as the ways in which the report had been
produced in the past. Listening to John’s explanations, Simon could reflect on whether parts of
the legacy report could be helpful for him in his upcoming discussions with Analytics’ technical
expert, or whether it could enable him to break down the managers’ requirements. From the
legacy report and John’s explanations, Simon inferred that the managers already had specific
expectations regarding the dashboard’s appearance.
When he walked the managers through the mock-up, Simon emphasized that it would
be important for the content of the dashboard to be consolidated into reports on a corporate
level. He further stressed that the managers would need to clearly define what they wanted to
see in the dashboard and why. John proposed that a workshop for eliciting and discussing the
requirements as well as the most appropriate visual representations in the dashboard to respond
to these. Simon appreciated this time commitment on side of John as “cooperative” and “pro-
active”. He expected that, after the workshop, work would overwhelmingly happen on his own
end; he would hold “most of the strings” in his hands and do technical work that would largely
not be visible to the managers. After the meeting, Dillan asked Simon to distribute the mock-
up to the project team, which he did.
22
A week later, John invited the team to a second meeting, this time to prepare the upcoming
dashboard workshop. In the meeting, John and Simon discussed the agenda of the workshop.
From John’s perspective, the workshop should be about “general alignment and how [the dash-
board] should look like”. He started by recapitulating which resources were already available
and what could potentially be used as inputs in the making of the dashboard, including
knowledge about data sources and their connections, the legacy report, and Simon’s mock-up.
For him, the:
...ideal outcome of such a meeting would be: we look at the [legacy] dashboards again, as an input. We know
which data we have [...] and we say: who is now the gentle audience who will look at it? And what are the
views that we want to have? A view over time, or a view into, I don’t know, costs, a KPI view [...] Could
imagine anything here.
He already now introduced certain constraints to the creative activities that would unfold within
the workshop:
For visualization, from my perspective, there should only be one dashboard. Regardless of how we feed that
[with data]. Of course, going forward, from the system and not from Excel – I believe we all agree on that.
[...] In the short-term, it doesn’t matter.
Further, he emphasized that, for him, the dashboard was something that could be enhanced over
time. It would, however, have to provide service managers with a well-rounded perspective on
service performance already in its first version:
That's where we want to go, that's the first stack of charts that we would like to have, that we maybe just
painted on and photographed. Where we say, that's how we about imagine it to look like. And that's the data
that goes in there and that's just the first version of which we say, if we have that, then the data is visualized
there already quite well. That you can always optimize there and do another deep dive and have another view,
criss-cross, that’s perfectly okay. This can be done over time, but those are the nine tiles I need to consider a
service. And I've seen it all, seen it from different angles, what’s in there. [...] We don't have to add the data
buckets in the workshop. That's easy, I think.
While Simon kept bringing up whether the flow from all different data sources into the dash-
board could be “automated”, this was not a priority for John. He would not be “averse” to it,
but left it to Simon to check whether such automation would be possible. In the PowerPoint
mock-up, Simon wanted to denote which data representation could be fed from which source
to “trigger the technical team” and “derive all the next steps”. He expected the workshop to
result in “a valuable output: where do we want to go, what do we want to show, what are the
data sources?”
23
After John had outlined, from his perspective, the steps for arriving at a common vision of the
dashboard, Dillan asked Simon to describe how Analytics would process the managers’ require-
ments and implement them in the dashboard. He was specifically interested whether their meth-
odology was “rather waterfall-like” or whether the dashboard would “continuously evolve” and
be “plan[ned] in small steps” during development, based on “intermediary results”. Simon ex-
plained:
In terms of the process, the way we work: in the beginning there is ‘discover’. That you say, okay, what's this
all about now? You make a [story]: what is the target group? And so on, we have already done all that, then
you go over to ‘functional decompose’. Then we say, okay, there we are right now. Actually, we already have
a lot – well, what’s a lot – we have already invested a lot of work there, but now we want to sharpen this
once more. And then we get to the technical phase of implementation and work is done in sprints there. So,
two-week sprints, and then, based on the results, you see what you can already implement. And then you
look at it again and again and then adjusts.
Simon also took up John’s point regarding how data would be available in the dashboard. He
used this point to introduce two notions – “personas” and “business questions” – from the
toolbox of Analytics:
John, you also told a little bit: which views are important now? How many personas do we have now? Is it
now only one view that the service manager is looking at? Like a high-level view? How many details does
one need? I always say: a dashboard should be action-oriented. One could also think about that. Which busi-
ness questions do we even want to answer with the respective tiles? That always helps. You know, when you
ask a question and say: you have ten leading business questions and you can answer them. And that becomes
a story, right? Because then it becomes very tangible.
John asked Simon to clarify whether he wanted to identify such questions for each persona.
Yes, they have different questions. Someone from operations will probably proceed in a much more defined
way than maybe a board member who looks at it.
Looking at the dashboard through the lenses of “personas” and which “business questions”
these might ask helped John relate and distinguish information needs among different roles
within his organization. On that basis, he was able to come up with a more detailed idea of the
requirements:
So, for example, spontaneously, from what I know now, we of course have the service manager who looks
at a single service. Then we have the divisions or operations teams for one division that look at several
services that belong to their org unit, for example. And then of course we also have our, let’s call it, high-
level management who look at CloudOps in summary or have an overview: which service is worth it or is
not worth it. Of course, it’s not that simple, but purely in terms of figures. So, who brings in a contribution
of positive or negative nature over a certain period of time? These are then of course completely different
questions. The service manager wants to know: are all my materials assigned correctly? Did I get the right
24
revenue share, is the right number of customers in there? And so forth. He looks more at single elements. So,
based on that, correct, it’s very good to keep these personas apart and say: who's getting in and how? And I
suppose that the views are slightly different or build on each other.
John and Simon ended the meeting with an agreement that they wanted to work towards a “pic-
ture” in the workshop. In line with the iterative approach that Simon had put forward, John
proposed:
[After the workshop] we sit down together for two to three hours again and consider in which corner, direction
we want to proceed, want to amend. So, as I said, I think it is right that we should go in cycles, as you said.
But now for the initial spark and prioritization of things it would be very important if we took a little more
time.
Discussing who else would need to be part of the workshop, Simon deemed it important to
involve one of his colleagues from Analytics, an “architect”, who could share “his questions
and perspective”:
Just so that he says what he thinks and we can give feedback and derive action points.
John did not mind involving the architect and even offered to make additional time to meet and
discuss with him. They concluded the meeting with a workshop agenda to “define mock-ups,
personas”, and “reasonable views [on data]”.
4.2. Struggling for sustainability
However, instead of involving Keith, the architect, directly into the workshop as planned, Si-
mon and John met with him in advance. Simon started the meeting by providing a short over-
view of the project to Keith. He covered assumed interdependencies to other workstreams and
the data sources that might become involved in building the dashboard. He stressed that it would
be important to establish a link from the dashboard to more aggregated reports in the firm and
that various interfaces to other experts would play a role in the project. Simon further explained
that the project team planned to align these in the upcoming workshop that he would then “work
along the mock-up” to identify and, as far as possible, automated data flows coming from dif-
ferent sources. He expected some data-related concepts, such as KPI definitions relevant to the
dashboard, to be relevant to contexts outside of the project as well. In his role an architect, Keith
was involved in multiple dashboard projects and tasked with driving consistency across these.
Simon thus wanted to give Keith an opportunity to voice his “gut feeling” about the project at
hand and to bring in his opinion on what was important to consider from Analytics’ perspective.
25
Keith wanted to better understand which data the project team wanted to include in the dash-
board, where these data were being stored, how they were restricted by existing accounting
practices, and how they were effecting cost transparency. Reiterating the perspectives of a ser-
vice manager and of CloudOps’ top management, John explained that the dashboard would
“deliver facts” so that services could be managed efficiently. The dashboard would enable the
right choices regarding the design of the overall service portfolio -- decisions about implement-
ing new services or cancelling unprofitable ones. The dashboard should thus allow top manag-
ers to trigger discussions with more operative employees, such as service managers, where nec-
essary and give these managers opportunities to analyze specific situations. From these intended
purposes of use, John then derived which data would be relevant “control input” for future
users. Following from this, John also determined which people have to be involved in deliver-
ing this data. With a more comprehensive perspective on the technological landscape of SoftCo,
Keith pointed out that some of the data sources mentioned by John were planned to be shut
down in the future. Thus, in the long run, the project team would have to turn to alternative data
sources.
During their dialogue, they also identified information needs which, due to insufficient
data quality in the source systems, could not be satisfied in an automated fashion. This meant
that manual work would need to be performed on a regular basis in order to supply the dash-
board with data. For John, however, it was a priority to get the dashboard up and running as
quickly as possible. Only then would John’s goal focus “of course” on fully automated data
supply. John considered automation a sign of project completion. Here, Simon jumped in:
But this [automation] is an important point. That would, in fact, be my expectation. I don’t know if this is so
challenging, but, also in your direction, Keith... (Keith: Expectation towards me? (laughs)) Well, if you are
not on the same page, you are free to say that. Okay, then, just, maybe, to everybody around. I, or, from
Analytics perspective, offer something [to automate]. So that you don’t always have to use Excel and then
upload. But have a planning environment to enter it, to trace it. From my point of view that is, for this project,
very important. And I would call it critical, too. I have already said internally, if we don’t have that, there is
no use in doing [the project].
Relating to the fact that the project had originally been rejected by another team within Analyt-
ics, Simon added:
That has to be the expectation. We’ll see how we can solve this. I have already discussed this a couple of
times. I had this ‘make-or-break’. I had analyzed this a bit. I could also have said: ‘From my point of view,
I’ll do another project.’ But I have very clearly said: ‘For me that’s an element we have to figure out.’ They
[the other team] had said: ‘This is not feasible. We are not able to do it.’ Then it died out for three month.
And now we have it. [...] We have to have a clear way here, and we must not lose track of it.
26
John expressed his consent, but also mentioned that automation would have to be done in a
“second iteration”. There would “always be people in the back who have to perform manual
work” and therefore the issue would keep resurfacing. He also brought up that the full automa-
tion of data flows was not merely a technical undertaking, but also something which required a
corresponding “change process”. He rejected Simon’s proposal, however, to expand the up-
coming workshop to discuss changes to processes. Instead, he wanted to focus the workshop
on the content and its visual representation within the dashboard. John preferred to treat such
changes as a follow-up topic where, because part of the problem was supposedly caused by
willingly accepted inaccuracies in cost accounting, the management accounting team needed to
be involved. He proposed:
But we can gladly, if we have the thing then in a few weeks, months, first version, we can say, okay, let's
think together with Controlling about this structure. [...] We have the nice data, but we can't present it de-
cently. That's what is hurting us in the first place right now. And in the second place, of course, automation
hurts us because it always costs us a lot of effort to do that. And I think as soon as we have the usage and a
few KPIs in it, the thing is reasonably stable for us anyway. In other words, we won't change or extend that
much anymore and then the time has come for automation.
John also admitted that the accounting structures set up by the CloudOps controlling team were
“homegrown”. While changing them might render more transparency, this would require a trade
off against any additional effort needed to create this transparency. John considered himself to
not be responsible and expected Analytics to advise and take further steps towards a full auto-
mation of data provisioning.
Another part of the discussion revolved around assurance of what Simon called “sus-
tainable reporting”. For him, this was about aligning the dashboard with other reports, making
their content reconcilable and consistent. However, John brings up that this might be problem-
atic since the use of terminology among managers was ambiguous at CloudOps. Key perfor-
mance indicators such as ‘number of customers’ were interpreted quite differently. To give an
example, while some might understand these as all those parties who had ever purchased a
service from SoftCo, others will follow a more restrictive interpretation and consider only those
who are actively subscribed to SoftCo’s services. Others might conceptualize customers in
terms of the revenue potential they hold for SoftCo. Therefore, as John explained, they tried to
avoid using such terminology in reports altogether and fall back on proxies, such as usage or
revenues. However, he considered this a “problem that the company has”, not only CloudOps.
Simon tried to involve Keith in the conversation, asking whether he wanted to give advice on
the proposed steps for moving forward. However, Keith refrained and remarked that, given the
27
restrictions from data sources and from existing accounting practices, there was currently no
chance to retrieve all of the data in a form which would correspond with the requirements. In
John’s opinion, there would need to be more comprehensive changes in the company. Once a
“pattern” was in place, the controlling team could adapt their accounting practices. The imple-
mentation in the dashboard could then follow. Simon, giving in, stated that he did not see a
quick solution at this point and that the team should now just carry out the project as far as
possible under the current restrictions.
John later described how he envisioned full automation in a staged approach:
And the first step will be for me, is, that the newly defined dashboard that [Simon] paints so nicely, can
import and use the data. He won't like that. I know that. Point one. And that in the next two months or three
months at the most. The next step which is then essential is that these data resources that are there are grad-
ually exchanged, so that no Excel is distributed any more, but the dashboard connects somewhere and the
system gets the data out, or perhaps it is also a synchronization at night. I don't know. In any case I don't have
to do anything more than indicating which quarter I'm interested in. And then these resources are gradually
replaced and then there are probably some data sinks left that you don't have in the system and then you have
to think about where to put it or how to get around it so that it is really automated. I see the first two... the
first step, in any case, in the first half of the year. The second step will be 80% in the second half of the year.
And the third step then over time. Depends on it. In that one you have to put more brainpower.
On side of Simon, there had been hopes that the architect would, in the meeting with John,
would take a stance on “sustainability”, challenging John’s staged approach and going directly
for a fully automated implementation:
Yesterday you also noticed it, when I had the lead architect there [...]. He’s a bit of a... he doesn't mince
matters at all. In itself, I think it's a good thing that he said there, do as you like. I was hoping a little bit from
him, well, here, notion of sustainability, how do we connect the elements, how do we connect the different
project streams that we now have towards cloud reporting. Because cloud business is rather new to us. And
there is a lot of movement now. And for me there is always a bit in my head: Well, what do the others do and
how can we learn from each other? But if he doesn't want to bother here...
John’s perception of the architect was that he did not have a strong preference at all as to how
the dashboard should be implemented. John implied that he and Simon failed to formulate and
represent a common position in the joint meeting. Further, in John’s opinion, not all contingen-
cies were in Simon’s power:
Well, Simon can't do that alone either. I think Simon still has to assert himself a bit within his organisation,
right? Because he himself is partly surrounded by doubters, as far as I’m noticing. You were there at the
appointment with the architect. [...] We could have told [the architect] everything. He didn't really care about
anything, did he? More or less. I also discussed that later with Simon, that the meeting didn't help much,
except that I now know what the architect thinks. [...] The third stage, that nothing at all comes from any
28
excels or other data sinks, that depends on many factors. That is not Simon’s fault and also partly not ours. It
depends on where what remains and where we can, or what we can avoid. Or what we can store somewhere
in a reasonable system. Right? Information that is not yet there today. Then we are actually successful in the
sense of the dashboard.
Simon and John’s differing interests and different guiding principles, such as the notion of sus-
tainability on one side, and John’s push for a rather expedient solution on the other side, drew
both parties into discussion. The fact that something was at stake prompted them to make their
case; to explicate their perspectives and understandings. Independent of the outcome of the
discussion, the information elicited and the opinions voiced could be related to and built upon
in further developments.
4.3. Working towards a picture
Three weeks after the project team, with John and Simon at its forefront, had first met and
roughly sketched out how to approach the project, they met on the day of the workshop. While
their meetings had so far largely happened remotely, using audioconferencing software, the
workshop brought them together in the same room. As preparation for the workshop, Sarah and
Dillan had interviewed some of the service managers to learn about which information they
wanted to find in the dashboard. John had also received some feedback from a service manager.
He had planned to bring two additional experts to the table, one familiar with service perfor-
mance metrics, the other familiar with the data in the legacy report. However, the latter one was
then not part of the meeting.
The creative activities of the project team within the workshop, spanning four hours
overall, unfolded over two phases. In the first phase, the team was concerned with identifying
information demands that would need to be answered by the dashboard. Simon opened the
workshop and elaborated on the procedure. In line with the workshop preparation meeting, he
drew on the notion of personas and their corresponding business questions. These should help
the project team to most comprehensively and accurately identify and structure service-oriented
information needs within CloudOps.
I don't want to a lot of talking now. I mean, most people already know the slides. We've had the user story
described here again and what I would like to do today is, maybe we'll just go through it again very briefly.
And then, in the next step, it would be important for me that we think about the dashboard. Meaning, everyone
separately on this paper here, that everyone notes his business questions, which he has for the dashboard. In
the sense of: which business question should a tile answer?
29
By “tile”, Simon was referencing the charts in the PowerPoint mock-up, alluding to their, rec-
tangular shape. to He was aware that, for this approach to work, input from the experienced
group of managers was essential and an important driver of the quality of the dashboard.
Okay, now we're really working on the mock-up and that should now be more like, not design thinking, but
really emerging from the group. Okay? And I think we're experienced enough that we now, from our point
of view, Analytics point of view, ask the right questions or we just ask when we think... Or: we steer a little
when we think that is necessary. But you also give your input, because in the end you should feel comfortable
with the dashboard and also say: okay, now I have something action-oriented, I can derive something there.
Although it was clear from prior discussions and from the user story that the primary audience
of the dashboard would be service managers, it had become clear that other roles and perspec-
tives seemed to be relevant as well. To not be overwhelmed by the different personas, Simon
proposed to focus on the service manager perspective and approach requirement elicitation from
the stance of that persona.
Exactly, we define first: okay, this is now the service manager. You should start with the most important
personas because, as I've heard, we might have different personas. But that we say, we start with the most
important one, because I, well, four hours or three to four hours always sounds like a lot, but sometimes it's
tight. And then I would say: okay, we define a role and say: okay, you look at it now and which questions
are relevant, alright? So, what does the person care about?
This sparked a discussion in the group what other personas needed to be considered, whether
these had the same or different information needs and to which extent these needed to be cov-
ered by the dashboard. In this discussion, the managers were relating to anecdotes, drawing on
their knowledge about the business and their personal experiences. Further, comparing their
partly differing perceptions of specific colleagues, what these colleagues were doing in their
daily business and where their attention was flowing, they collectively inferred a model of the
personas to use for the purposes of the workshop.
Dillan: Well, a service manager might be more interested in adoption numbers or, well, quantitative usage
numbers and a manager is presumably more interested in monetary numbers. That’s where I'd include those.
Yes, that’s actually it. What I can think of.
Sarah: And what about the colleagues from operations, like [Max] for example? He also looks at the various
services in that division. Is he then recognized as ‘manager replacement’? Does he?
Jim: Well, he does it on behalf of a manager.
Sarah: On behalf of a manager, right? Well, then let's say ‘general manager’. It’s somehow identical. Okay?
Dillan (laughs): I don't know if the managers like it when you say ‘general manager’.
Sarah: That's internal now, for us. We don't have to hang it out!
Jim: Well, they can explain to us what they need differently, more or differently.
30
While letting discussion between the experts flow, Simon used a flipchart in the room to put
down the roles emerging, finally rendering the group with three overlapping personas: a service
manager persona, a general manager persona and a product owner persona.
As soon as the personas were identified, Simon handed out sticky notes, one color per
person, and markers to everyone and asked them to spend some time thinking about which
questions each of the personas might need to answer using the dashboard.
Good. These are now the three roles that we have there. And perhaps simply that now everyone spends some
thoughts on which... simply the important business questions which one sees in this respect, in relation to this
reporting. That would be important to me once again that everyone notes that down for another five to ten
minutes.
Afterwards, everyone presented the business questions they were able to come up with when
putting themselves in the shoes of the three personas that were visible on the flipchart.
We've identified three persons... personas. service manager, general manager and product owner. So, as a
service manager I'm interested in how many customers use my service? How does the trend look like? And
what's the adoption size, I wrote that down there. Then I wrote for the ‘manager’: how high are the costs per
service for the customer? That should also be of interest to them. How high are the costs for the service
internally? Also, how high are my internal costs versus what I charge out? What are the revenues of my
services and trend and how does the usage develop of services we provide? Maybe I need to stick on a little
closer. [...] How is the usage of my services developing? I think everyone should be interested in that. How
is the adoption of the services we offer changing? When did which services go GA? That perhaps should also
be of interest to them, because in the beginning it can happen that the services have to ramp up and, I don't
know, if you set certain boundary conditions there? After half a year, you first look at it, because I don't know
how it's going today. And how are my services offered and sold?
Along similar lines, everyone proceeded and put their sticky notes on the flipchart, assigning
them to one or multiple of the three personas. During this process, Simon stayed at the front,
from time to time asking clarifying questions, pointing out similarities between personas, re-
moving redundancies, amending or varying questions of other members of the project team and
also putting up his own ones.
Well, as service manager I would be interested to know how high my service margin is? Perhaps from a
manager's point of view, how good is our margin compared to SoftCo’s portfolio? But I'm just telling my
point of view now. Is that relevant? Service, a banal question, have my costs increased? Are we purchasing
too many services SoftCo-internally? I don't know. Just came to my mind. Managerial view. Which product
is the most profitable? And why? In general, I would like to see that in between, have we achieved our goals?
I mean, actual versus plan? I don't know if that makes a bit of sense now. Maintenance costs versus develop-
ment costs. Does that make sense anywhere?
31
This creative effort rendered the group with a flipchart full of stick notes containing business
questions on a broad range of subjects (see figure 2). Most of the questions were asked in a way
that answering them would enable users to reasonably take specific decisions such as ramping
a service up or down, sourcing externally or internally or getting rid of an unprofitable service
altogether. The meeting participants gathered around the flipchart. Since every person had been
assigned sticky notes of a certain color, each questions could easily be traced back to each
bystander. This way, everybody could investigate and inquire directly about the questions oth-
ers had come up with, often providing a stage to the originator of the respective question to
provide the rationale for it – often coming down to their understandings of the business – to the
group.
Figure 2. Collection of business question on flipchart.
32
Everyone had opportunity to take control of the flow of conversation, enabling them to direct
attention of the group to certain questions. This led, in some cases, to a down-prioritization of
questions, “parking” them in the “backlog”:
Simon: What are the fixed and variable costs for my services? In brackets: development costs versus user-
dependent costs.
Sarah: Do we have user-dependent costs in the services?
Simon: That's an interesting question.
John: Well, development costs, I think that's not what we are doing today.
Dillan: Well, we don't consider development costs at all in all these things. Because those are development
costs and the others are costs of cloud operations. But the question of fixed and variable costs is actually very
interesting. And it is interesting per service, because actually we are interested in, per service, what are the
fixed costs? It could be that a service provides an infrastructure and can serve 100,000 customers with it and
currently has only 5,000 customers. Then it has not yet reached its break even. And another service has to
provide one database for each customer. So it has a fixed cost share per customer. We haven't implemented
this whole perspective properly yet.
Jim: That's also the question. When you go to a new data center, do you do a pre-investment, a fixed invest-
ment, regardless of whether customers are on it or not?
Dillan: Well, this stepwise fixed costs in total and then per data center, per customer. We don't have that
correctly implemented.
John: Well, in the operations costs, the fixed and variable costs, that's interesting. In any case, yes. But the
development costs, I don't think we should include them. That's also difficult, I think.
Dillan: But this is a big construction site, so at the moment we don't have that right.
Simon: Yes, what do we do with it? Parking?
Dillan: Backlog.
After clearing the flipchart, Simon pointed out that, from his perspective, there were similarities
in the content that some of the questions were asking for. He validated his observation with
John, also with reference to the early mock-up Simon and Dillan had created:
Simon: Let's just go over it for a moment. I'll cluster it and then, based on that, I'd just start the discussion,
prioritizing it a bit. Yes, so to speak. Because there's something emerging here. I have usage, I have margin,
I have costs. Yes, only the customer was...
John: Was a bit missing.
Simon: Missing in here, although it was prominent in the first mock-up. It’s included in all mock-ups. Well,
the licensed customers are there.
John: I would really move the customer in the direction of usage at this point. It belongs to that. I think if we
also note down licensed customers, that helps. But it is just not the ultimate measure of things. Meaning,
usage is much better, because you just say: That’s what I delivered. I can cumulate the costs for that. Because
‘licensed’ means: I've sold it, whether it's used at all or how much someone uses it – doesn't tell you anything,
does it? That's why it belongs there. It's additional information. It is certainly still important in this dimension
today. But, as I said, I think the usage is more important.
33
Prior to proceeding, Simon asks the managers whether, in light of the business questions that
had emerged, they wanted to stick with the personas for the remainder of the workshop.
Simon: Then something that I find challenging is: we have three roles, right? So, three roles now. Whether
we should concentrate a little on one role and identify some prioritization and then the business questions or
whether we say it's a mix. Well, it's a bit difficult to say then. Three roles are a bit challenging. If you then
say: you have the dashboard and now have three personas in it who look at the dashboard in completely
different ways. Does that make sense, or: should we try this balancing act?
John: My suggestion would be to stick to the personas.
Simon: Okay.
John: As I said, there is also, I think, a big overlap. I also think the questions are partly different and the KPIs
are different. But, I think the data is the same, it just depends on the posed question, aggregation, compilation.
In a short break, Simon clustered the business questions on the flip chart according to the five
information categories ‘customer’, ‘revenues’, ‘costs’, ‘usage’ and ‘margin’ which he found
were “emerging”. When the researchers asked him in the break whether he was content with
the way the workshop was developing, he replied:
Yes, yes. I have, I started a bit with freestyle, but then still had to use my experience a bit. Well, clustering is
always difficult. You see that there have been so many questions, a bit confusing, right? If you do it on
PowerPoint, everything gets a little more difficult. But at least I have a structure. I have these three roles. I
have usage, customer, cost, margin and that's exactly how I'm going to approach it now. Exactly, a margin
block and now we are building the dashboard on the wall. I already thought about that, I know the rooms a
bit, I just didn't know now, I thought, maybe we can solve it differently. Every business unit is wired a bit
differently. You know, sometimes they move very strongly into advance. Then I thought: ‘Alright, this time
you will lead through’. And I'm also glad that we were able to condense that a bit. We have, I think, done it
quite well now. We don't have an awful lot of time now, but not too little either. But I think that we can build
something good there. Here, this would now be our main dashboard. And then maybe I want the other walls
for the general manager or, we'll see where there are overlaps. I don't know if the colour coding will help. I
don't want to provide too much input now. I just want to have these blocks. What are these? Which business
questions will be answered now? Exactly. So, we have the business questions and which tiles do I want now?
After the break, in the second phase of the workshop, the focus of activities shifted from iden-
tifying the information required by the different personas to how this information could best be
visually represented at the user interface of the dashboard. Each of the information categories
was represented on a separate sticky note which was then placed on a wall of the meeting room.
John concluded that the general manager persona and the product owner persona were actually
just consolidations of the service manager persona. Since the general manager and the product
owner persona were asking similar or identical business questions to the service manager, he
found that the former two would be reducible to the latter.
34
John: I would imagine that if I am now a general manager or product owner, then I always have multiple
services, so I want to see the key data about these things. [...] I want to see a trend, where does the thing
stand, how has it developed, these services? If I'm the product owner now and I'm interested in the service,
then I'm actually assuming the role of the service manager. Then I actually have a detail-view. That is why I
believe that these general manager- and product owner-views, those are some kind of superstructure-views,
providing – for the question we had – important indicators. But as soon as I say, now I am interested in that
service, then I am actually the service manager. Then I go into the detail view. Then it's also much easier for
you. This means that if we now have the service manager view, we only have to say – in quotation marks,
it's also difficult – what are the important key figures that you have for the single one? And if I then go in, I
get into the detail view.
Simon: So, you would start with the service manager or rather with the...
John: service manager.
This insight led the team, when moving from the flipchart to the wall, to leaving their persona-
category-logic of the flipchart behind and continuing with a category-only logic from the sole
perspective of the service manager persona. For each category, Simon proposed, the team
should now think of charts that would best correspond to the information needs of that category.
He proposed that the charts should be drawn on sticky notes, these being put up on the wall
next to the category it should belong to. Then, business questions of that category would be
moved from the flipchart to the wall (see figure 3). To come up with new charts that could
potentially be used in the dashboard, the team started out by imagining how a service manager
would access the dashboard, which questions this manager would ask in which order and how
they would, given that order, navigate within the report. Here, John often argued from what he
thought would be interesting for service managers:
If you say now, as an entry tile. So, when I say, what interests me, what makes me click into that, I imagine
that as a service manager. And I would be worried about two things. On the one hand, if the costs go down
drastically, then my curiosity would go up and say, oh God, nobody's using that anymore, or it has become
extremely cheap. Or I would ask myself, oops, the costs explode, what happened there? [...] What I still
have... I don't know now whether this is [Analytics]-like: What I could wish for is if I now have reporting
periods here, now here quarterly, that I then have the deviation from the last quarter. Where I say, okay, now
the trend there is going upward, then say, okay, that is now 10,000 Euros more than in the quarter, in the last
reporting period. That is always the question. If I see such a trend, then I say to myself, okay, fair enough, it
has risen. How much was it now? And I could imagine that we know that without clicking on it.
Based on such initial explanations, Simon would draft an initial chart. Workshop participants
would then specify and provide background information on certain aspects of the CloudOps
business, the service portfolio or backend processes so that Simon could refine the chart until
it met the expectations of the managers. He also kept some design parameters in suspense,
35
remarking that they were “not set in stone” and that “maybe one should consult their pillow and
dream of it”. This way, discussion could reach saturation before going on to the next aspect.
Simon also encouraged the managers to directly walk up to the wall themselves and visualize
their ideas.
Figure 3. Workshop participants developing charts and assigning business questions.
To test whether information content of a chart was robust in answering the assigned business
questions, workshop participants elaborated, each from their perspective, on certain aspects of
the business they deemed important and ran them against the chart. In doing this, they evaluated
the quality of the charts relative to the side conditions and idiosyncrasies illustrated by their
anecdotes. For instance, Dillan, coming from a cost accounting perspective, problematized the
scale of the measurement unit on one chart in the ‘ratio’ category:
Dillan: Well, that's a sticking point. While we're at it, the second sticking point is when we do have a metric
for the service, but different sizes. So, the metric for database service is always ‘instance’. But there are
different instances. There is small, medium, large. Now the service sells, or, the service has an output of five
small and ten medium and 20 large. Now, what unit costs do we want to show? And the solution to this
problem is only one in my eyes: you have to have one... And the planned costs are calculated for each one
separate. So there are planned costs for small, medium and large. Now I have to calculate virtual, virtual
planned costs and keep the virtual actual costs. So, a weight, and virtual plan costs would be the weighted
average and thus weighted with the output, with the output quantity. So, if my planned costs were X across
36
all service sizes and my actual costs are then also added up across all service sizes together. These I can
compare then.
Simon: Okay, but then there is a definitonal need.
Dillan: Yes, and those are the difficulties with this representation.
Simon: But if we had that resolved, it would be a nice diagram.
Dillan: Then you can agree on it.
Depending on the outcome of such tests, a question could be assigned to another category on
the wall than it had formerly been assigned to on the flipchart, it could get reassigned from one
chart to another on the wall or a chart type could altogether be replaced by another type. It could
also happen that new categories such as ‘ratio’ and others would be added, and yet others such
as ‘customer’ dropped. Some categories were added by Simon when transitioning from the
flipchart to the wall but remained unused throughout the process. Whenever the group could
not reach consensus on some aspect, they skipped it so that the flow of the meeting was never
interrupted for longer periods. In most cases, these aspects were automatically resolved later in
the process or became irrelevant. Continuing in this manner, the group took the business ques-
tions down from the flipchart and moved them to the charts on the wall, until they ended up
with six categories and one to two charts per category (see figure 4).
An underlying commonality of the discussions in the workshop had been that they were
in some sense all about establishing common understandings. Some participants of the work-
shop directed the discussion towards certain aspects, others attempted to share relevant infor-
mation or at least their opinion: What are the responsibilities of certain roles in the organization?
Which information systems are available and what restrictions does their use bring with them?
What are other teams within SoftCo doing and what are implications of their work for my own?
What are the steps required to advance the dashboard, and in which order? While the stated
purpose of the workshop was to work towards the dashboard, discussions in the meeting often
touched and then drifted towards other topics that were not always directly relevant to building
the dashboard. These included discussions on quality of SoftCo’s technological landscape, ex-
plication of tacit business logics, circumstances not controllable by the project team that might
affect their affairs, the need for a user authorization concept to determine which users should
see which information in the dashboard or the discovery of new requirements:
John: Well, we can, adoption in the sense of licensed customer, yes, we can't leave it out. Not at the moment,
no. But maybe in three, four years? It may look completely different then, but that's how it is at the moment,
right?
Simon: Yes. Alright.
37
John: Well, what I found very intriguing now was that, when I have margin, there are costs and there is
revenue, right? And I found now interesting that the majority is allocated to usage costs? So, service delivery
from its and the small part that occurred very little is, certainly, that was the revenue par, right? I have to
compare these, right? I found that quite interesting that focus was on that. But I think it's good.
Sarah: Yes, probably because we all know that we can only influence the costs, but not the revenue part.
Figure 4. Workshop result and implementation priorities.
At another point, the discussion revolved around the relative importance of one performance
measure over another:
Simon: What was that? Deliberate was an LOB.
Sarah: LOB, well, then.
Simon: That was from Dillan.
Dillan: Yes.
Sarah: Explain again, what was meant by that?
Dillan: It is meant, I think, that was...
Sarah: How are our things used by a LOB, right?
Dillan: Well, it is... exactly. From whom to which LOBs do we deliver?
Sarah: So, usage?
Dillan: Yes.
38
Sarah: Usage.
John: Well, that essentially means which user, which usage do I offer? From what? To whom? And what are
the costs? These are the two facets. Or rather just the first part.
Dillan: The first part.
Sarah: The first. That's right.
Simon: Good, but very much concentration on usage, right? Then I have the margin. Margin includes, I still
have turnover and costs, there we have some and...
Sarah: Costs.
Simon: Costs, but customer was also, I did... we had a tile with licensed customer. That was also important
to me.
Sarah: Whereas Jim has said, licensed customer, that is not necessarily the important number anymore, but
the adoption would be more important, right?
Jim: Utilization is also more important.
Sarah: Or utilization then rather.
Explicating and discussing such aspects, exchanging information on them or just sharing news
from other departments held potential for each of the workshop participants to develop a better
understanding of the project environment as well as staying up to date on what was going on
elsewhere in the firm. Which specific aspects came up was largely determined by the content
of the discussions around the dashboard. Especially discussions around those elements of the
dashboard requiring work at the interface with experts from other departments outside the pro-
ject team seemed to redirect the flow of conversation.
During the whole process, the team refrained from orienting the creative process to-
wards the legacy report that was already there. They did not look at it in the workshop so that
they could start fresh. Simon concluded the meeting by providing to the managers a brief over-
view of the further timeline which he had visualized on PowerPoint slides:
Yes, but that's the way I want to, I think, prepare it. As I said. And then just jot down where the breaches are,
where there still are follow-ups. That can then also be represented nicely. Also in terms of colors. Plan...
Well, I don’t know, we have to see. We have our operating model, we are a bit functional to technical. So, at
the bottom. There we have a little bit of discovery, functional perspective now with the mock-up. Then, of
course, we have to take a technical perspective and then we have to get it up and running at some point, and...
I can't say how long that will take. You know how it is. Then it's Easter holidays, that comes quickly, May is
another month like this, where you can work intensively once more. Then the Whitsun holidays come again.
Then there is another short month and then summer holidays arrive, right? And then we get back to work in
September. You know all that.
Simon added that the main workload would shift over to Analytics as soon as he would have
fully understood the managers’ requirements:
39
Actually, to be fair I have to say, if the definition is still right, a little bit of the breaks, if we have discussed
all this, then you could say, yes here, there you have it now and now we are waiting for the result. So, that's
the way it's supposed to be. If that is clear, then the work is with us – occasionally we have inquiries – but
otherwise the work is actually with us and then... we also don't actually announce delivery dates. We can
only do that after the technical decompose. Because, you have to imagine this as a portfolio, you go in there,
into the finance cluster and then there are so many things and if Christian Klein says, no, I'm extremely
interested in something else now, then...
He promised to, in the upcoming days, do his “homework” and overhaul the dashboard mock-
up according to the charts and categories the team had worked out. Sarah and Dillan would then
revert to some of the service managers with the updated mock-up to get additional feedback.
Further, Simon indicated that he would need to involve additional parties to check how and
from which databases the defined charts could be fed.
As soon as I have a good understanding, I would start with that now or with her, that's [Lisa], who is in
France, and I'm going to go through that with her now. She will ask all the questions again, but of course I
need definitional... Well, fair enough, as far as the P&L is concerned, there it’s myself... I understand it on
my own, I'm a P&L information owner myself. But with the other things, I still have to... I have to get a
picture now and then I have to discuss with her technically what she understands, what we can implement,
where there are still follow-ups and then it comes to development of the views, which of course is also chal-
lenging... We have cloud reporting, we have P&L, we have [other databases], we still have Excel, right? If
we would even more think semi-automatically – this will become a big task. It's really not an easy endeavor.
[...] I can of course pre-visualize a dashboard, but build? If you say, I automatically extract KPIs and dimen-
sions, I can only do that when it's in the view. So I have to build now, I have to build a technical view now
that I can consume. I say, I go into the dashboard now and say: I need ‘service manager’. I need revenue. I
need... I need to have all these components automated and now I also need to see where they come from.
Orchestrating the creative effort of the team within the workshop room, often directly engaging
in it himself, Simon had created a delineated, physical space within the project that encouraged
the managers to utilize resources such as their creativity and their knowledge to achieve a com-
mon goal. Various analogous and digital technologies as well as seemingly circumstantial ele-
ments of the infrastructure within that space facilitated achievement of this goal and put the
members of the project team into a mode of critical thinking and dialectical problem-solving,
offering opportunity to instantly relate to and scrutinize the publicly voiced ideas of team mem-
bers associated with other functional domains or perspectives. Herein, constructing a repertoire
of personas helped them switch between different frames of perception and information pro-
cessing, and build the dashboard in a way so that it directly corresponded to the needs of certain
roles. Throughout the process, the participants of the workshop, some involving themselves
40
more than others, developed a common understanding of the desired form and content of the
dashboard.
In the workshop and the preparation meeting before, people often proactively offered
additional guidance to Simon in the form of documents or verbal explanations when they per-
ceived him as someone who could pass on this information in an adequate format to experts in
other domains, lending ability to the analytical owner role to attract information whose exist-
ence he might otherwise not have been aware of. All this enabled Simon to update the mock-
up so that it now contained, with few deviations, the charts that the project team had envisioned
together and assigned to categories. Each chart was denoted by Simon with a label indicating
the data source he was planning to connect to that chart to reach a functional state of the dash-
board (see figure 5).
Figure 5. Update of mock-up according to workshop results (reconstruction).
While in the call with Keith, prior to the workshop, Simon had still been strongly reluctant to
implement a solution that was not fully automated, after the workshop, the tone changed. In a
meeting with John and Sarah following the workshop day, he explained that he would person-
ally not mind to, in a first step, deliver the dashboard without full automation, whereupon the
following conversation between him and John unfolded:
Simon: I have just told Sarah that we need a go from management, because usually we only deliver, let's say,
rather an automated solution than that we say, okay, we now build something Excel-based and then we grad-
ually replace it. But I also said to Sarah that it also has a certain charm doing it this way because we have
many data sources. I would also be interested in it personally, because there is a certain closeness and not
working through the whole thing in such a blocky way. So, from that perspective, I would be in good spirits
41
and open to it. The other thing then is, will management support it that way. But I already signalled there [...]
I'm not locked up there and say: 'No, we wait until everything is automated'. I hope it's not too much effort
to do that, but of course it helps to prepare the whole thing and think about it again from an [Analytics] point
of view. From my perspective that would be something I would like to support, but, as I told you...
John (interrupts): Two aspects are important here. A), if we can't do it that way, we have double the effort,
because we have to adapt more in the current dashboard, because we can't wait that long. And on the other
hand it would of course have the charm that the [service managers] get the same dashboard from us, no matter
if it is running via Excel or directly from the system. As long as we're all committed to the goal, I think that's
the right approach. I do think these two arguments are important.
Simon: Yes, yeah, absolutely. That's how I would see it. I don't think we will be going away from that either.
I just want to be in agreement with, you know how it is with strategy, and... you know that you have to be
considerate about some things and have to obtain a decision.
John: Let’s put it this way, if [your manager] decides against it, then I’m also happy to talk to her.
In fact, following this meeting, Simon’s manager approved that data supply of the dashboard
could be fully automated at a later point in time, making the case now an exception to the usual
policy. John brought up that managers from within CloudOps were already “tugging” at him,
asking for financials. He thus wanted to deliver “something that is stable, that we get along
with” and “generalize” later. With the way now being free for a “semi-automated dashboard”
as Simon called it, and after the workshop being equipped with a better understanding of the
managers’ expectations and of the operative environment of the relevant personas, Simon
worked towards bringing the now refined, yet still purely visual dashboard mock-up to life. To
arrive at a functional version, he not only reported in regular meetings with the managers around
John on his progress, aligned with them on the next steps and acquired information on social
and technical resources he could utilize. Beyond that, Simon liaised with additional experts
from a variety of domains inside and outside of Analytics. These experts were partly announced
by the managers, partly identified by Simon from within his network. This especially included
people in technical roles such as software developers or database administrators that would help
him locate information in the firm’s complex array of data structures and bring it into a form
he deemed “consumable” for the dashboard. Interestingly, even though one of Analytics’ de-
clared ambitions was to have the majority of SoftCo’s data available in a comprehensive data-
base they labelled the firm’s “single source of truth”, at least part of the data required in this
case seemed to not be readily available in it. Simon further kept catching up with the most
recent feedbacks that Dillan and Sarah were collecting from colleagues within CloudOps. The
two discovered in the meantime that the personas used in the workshop were not in every case
comprehensive or accurate and that there was variance within the information needs of the peo-
ple whom the personas ought to represent. Interviewing some of these people, the future users
42
of the dashboard, the researchers learned that the deviations from personas would largely go
back to idiosyncrasies such as specifics in their managed services or their individual preferences
regarding data visualization.
4.4. Technical talks
Simon now started “the first technical talks” to “technically inform [the experts] what specifi-
cally needs to be done”. Hereto, he buffered the input received in the preceding discussions and
directed it into the right channels within Analytics or other organizations, e.g. receiving require-
ments worded in business terminology and transmitting those, often in another format, to third
parties. These third parties then either create parts of the tool or conduct critical groundwork
for Simon to do it. Buffering the vast input he had received, he translated the charts and cate-
gories defined in the workshop into an extensive list denoting each discrete piece of information
such as ‘total expenses’, ‘third parties’ or ‘revenues’ that would need to be fed into one of the
charts. Performing this conceptual breakdown of the dashboard to a detailed, tabular represen-
tation (see figure 6), he added for each object the data sources he expected to contain it, which
expert was technically responsible for it and which actions he needed to take in order to estab-
lish a technical link from the respective source into the dashboard. This operationalization
guided him on whom to talk to in the firm about what and how the result of the conversation
would tie back into the dashboard. Following this ‘master table’, he reached out to various
parties across the firm to either inquire about interdependencies to other projects, availability
and quality of data and the technological infrastructures hosting it, and also to acquire resources
such as existing reports or other documents from which he could “learn”. The learning would
always happen relative to the mock-up of the dashboard the project team had created in the
workshop, representing the desired target state. To facilitate the learning, Simon would use
auxiliary technologies, his own knowhow or his experience to trigger insightful discussions and
fit knowledge from other domains into his own frame of reference. For instance, to be able to
feed the ‘revenue’ category in the dashboard with data, Simon consulted a technical expert to
have him transfer revenue data from a source system to a technical location from which they
could flow into the dashboard. To explain to the expert the requirements that had been sketched
out in the workshop, Simon showed the expert the charts of the mock-up. When this not sufficed
to make the requirement clear, Simon used specific technical vocabulary the expert could relate
to. The revenue expert made clear that he expected to receive the requirement in a very specific
format to be able to correspond to it, a format that would have likely been foreign to the
CloudOps managers.
43
In another case, Simon consulted a controller responsible for an existing CloudOps report re-
lated to the ‘costs’ category of the dashboard. He wanted to learn from the controller which data
sources she used to create her report and see if he could reuse those sources to feed the ‘costs’
chart. Again, he summoned the mock-up on screen to convey to her in pictures what he was
looking for. She then could immediately relate to it and knew which report he was looking
for. It then turned out that, since Simon held additional responsibilities within Analytics, going
Figure 6. Analytical owner's tabular representation of the dashboard.
beyond his analytical owner role, he did not even need the controller to send him the report.
Given his own comprehensive access permissions within the system, he could retrieve the re-
port himself and “derive” everything he needed, shortcutting the process. Even more, since he
had formerly worked at SoftCo as a controller for a longer period, it was also not a problem for
him to make sense of the financials in the report and the terminology used to describe these.
Both consultations, with the technical expert and the controller, allowed Simon to further com-
plete his master table, moving him step further to the functional dashboard.
Not always, however, was Simon successful in involving experts into the project. At
another point in the project, he reached out to technical expert whose role is described by as
someone who “translates and implements definitions and business requirements into data mod-
els and analytical views”. He hoped that he could explain the requirements from the dashboard
project to her and get her on board to help with the project. Her manager, however, blocked
Simon’s request given that there would be “other, higher prioritized topics”.
Three month after the actors had come together for the first time, Simon was finally
ready to infuse the dashboard, so far merely in existence as a shallow representation of the
44
project team’s visions and ideas, with actual functionalities. Using a digital canvas from the
dashboard building apparatus of Analytics, he brought the threads that he had been disentan-
gling over the last weeks all together. On the canvas, he crafted a variety of virtual graphical
elements, arranging them in relations to each other so that a number of discernable compositions
of shapes and colors emerged, recognizable as, but still somehow different to the charts and
categories contained in the mock-up. The understandings of personas, logics and restrictions
pre valent in the realm of CloudOps which had originally started as not more than four written
sentences in the user story, and which had been refined in hours and hours of discussing and
questioning ideas, now helped Simon to paint the picture as desired. He included in the dash-
board ways to look on data from different angles and possibilities to view and aggregate various
subsets of data over a multitude of different objects of economic interest.
Finally, connecting the charts and categories with the data sources that Simon had in-
vestigated into with various technical experts, the dashboard started to display actual, consum-
able facts about the CloudOps business in an interactive, dynamic view that could be adapted
towards the needs of different users almost from one moment to another.
Although the analytical owner was in our case not consistently successful in implement-
ing the notion of sustainability throughout the project, we learned that he acted both as a gate-
keeper and a door-opener to resources involved in and required for building the dashboard while
at the same time being dependent on input from other parties himself. While bringing the ideas
and different knowledges of the project team to life in the form of a purposeful tool marked the
end of a rather aesthetically-centered episode of work on the dashboard, it marked at the same
time the beginning of another episode, although a more technical one. While the CloudOps
managers were now ready to provide their colleagues and supervisors with increased transpar-
ency on the CloudOps portfolio in the form of a novel tool that would only need some minor
refinements here and there, the discussion around full automation of data flow, while it had
temporarily disappeared, had only been postponed.
5. Discussion
Within our case, we encounter many of the substantial negatives in inscriptions that discussions
in prior literature refer to in terms of absence, inaccuracy, or incompleteness (Busco & Quat-
trone, 2015, 2018; Jordan, Mitterhofer & Jørgensen, 2018; Quattrone, 2017; Martinez &
Cooper, 2019). As it was still in the process of development, the dashboard and the many visuals
which constituted it were addressed as a flawed tool.. While different individuals were invested
45
in the outcome of the project to varying extents, it seems rather unsurprising that, overall, im-
perfections and absences sparked discussions among the participants. Almost all activities dur-
ing the process were of visual nature – actors created pictures with colored sticky notes, flip-
charts and PowerPoint; they projected screens to each other and discussed their displays; they
drew charts on digital and analogous canvases; and personas were constructed to see through
the eyes of others. Thus, it would be puzzling to find, in such an all-encompassing visual world,
one who was not engaged or encouraged by the abundance of representational negatives in these
visual performable spaces (Busco & Quattrone, 2015). However, seeing our case through the
more processual lens of inscribing reveals that there is something beyond the negative in the
substance of inscriptions.
Looking beyond the properties of inscriptions as a final product, we find that negatives
play a significant role in shaping the transformations involved in inscribing as well. In fact,
some scholars studying accounting inscriptions have already related to different types of these
transformational negatives, which are involved in the transformative processes of inscribing,
such as “unsettledness” of inscriptions (Andon et al., 2007), competition between professional
groups for inscribing aspects of the organization (Lowe & Koh, 2007), lack of human support
in developing and defending inscriptions (Qu & Cooper, 2011) leading to their rejection, or the
absence of industry standards which make inscribing difficult (Wouters & Sandholz, 2018).
However, in doing so, they have not established that they were referring to the same
analytical category, namely that of transformational negatives. Transformational negatives re-
fer to negatives in that which produces the substance of inscriptions. Transformational nega-
tives are not to be confused with translation. While the latter describes displacing elements in
distant contexts and bringing them back to the center, the former refers to transformations that
elements undergo when involved in that journey. In Latour’s example of the French explorer
Lapérouse (1987, p. 215ff.), the ship that is supposed to bring knowledge about the shapes of
distant shores back to the cartographers’ chart rooms in Europe is transformed in the process.
Waves and wind erode hull and sails, disease can plague the crew, grime and carelessness attack
the integrity of the ships journal, and naupathia can distort the captain’s memories of the distant
territory he had encountered and is supposed to bring back home. None of these things are
represented in the map – the final inscription – but nevertheless have power to shape it.
Transformational negatives include tense relationships between actors who have ‘a his-
tory’; who compete due to their organizational roles or the values and rationales that guide the
procedures and techniques of inscribing; there are often disconnects in infrastructures due to
46
technical hurdles, or rituals in different discussion cultures and meetings. This also applies to
the agency of individual actors. Although it might be easily confused to be insignificant in large
actor-network, situational resourcefulness, internalized values, and attitudes toward the site can
change the trajectory of inscribing. For instance, Simon told us after the call when he failed to
mobilize the support of Keith: “Now, if you don't like something, you would push into a differ-
ent direction, too, wouldn’t you? And maybe the other person doesn't even notice at all, in that
moment, that he could have got much more from you if he had won your heart. I mean, in a
natural way. [...] And that's where you like to give. And then the best things come into being.”
Beyond that, we found further examples of transformational negatives during the in-
scribing process as it unfolded in our case. At SoftCo, a feeling of technological superiority led
some actors in Analytics to pursue a dream of perfect combinability. Reality then confronted
them with limitations in the form of an insufficiently integrated data landscape. Imperfect com-
binability of precursory inscriptions in the technological infrastructure handicapped the process
of developing a mobile inscription; that is, an inscription that could be dispatched into distant
corners of the organization without much effort. This prevented actors from implementing a
fully automated data flow straight away. Further, the interpretive regimes that certain political
and organizational narratives (and the absence of others) might force upon the ways of consum-
ing inscriptions also affect the transformative moments of their conception. For instance, we
find that the sustainability-centered inscribing rationale of Analytics remains a normative claim.
This allowed John’s expediency rationale to unfold. As a consequence, full automation of data
provision is put to trial and rejected.
A similar dynamic occurred for disharmonies between, or bricolage within and across,
prevailing procedural conventions. During the construction of the dashboard, we observed in-
consistency between the working methodologies used by the project team and those they actu-
ally employed to develop the dashboard. Simon started the workshop stating that the team
should not do “design thinking” to work on the dashboard but then implemented methods char-
acteristic for exactly that approach. In an interview, another representative of Analytics with
the same role as Simon stated that “partly, I have now implemented things in such a way that
they are perhaps not compliant with the standard”. In light of such statements, it seems unlikely
that such deviations from norms always goes back to inability or ignorance. Rather, it seems
that there is a certain intentionality involved. This might be functional insofar as blends of
methodologies serve purposes beyond what each of the eclectically mobilized methodologies
could accomplish on its own. Finally, what further permeated the transformational processes
47
throughout the dashboard project was the absence of an exclusive authority. Simon, John, and
the technical experts in Analytics as well as the visual technologies involved in inscribing were
simultaneously shaping the course of the project. The influences of these actors were based on
different knowledges, all valuable and necessary for inscribing the dashboard. All of these
knowledges had a relative strength at different stages throughout the project. As we have seen
in Lowe & Koh (2007), this can be problematic in that the presence of different professional
groups in inscribing can lead to competition over privileged positions within a network. We see
from these examples that negatives create voids at the site of inscribing, which demand to be
filled, and leave room for creative forces to expand into. At the same time, they can deflect and
thus detour the course of social action, at times creating unexpected outcomes in the process of
translation.
In line with the turn towards inscribing, and reflecting upon our case from the perspec-
tive of that which is insufficient, flawed or not there at all, we call for studies of accounting to
afford more attention to negatives in processes of inscribing: not only in, but around inscrip-
tions in the world that is represented “in its absence” (Latour, 1987, p. 247). We use the term
‘negatives’ to point to counter-stances and alternative perspectives that are yet to be taken. We
thereby direct attention to the inconspicuous, yet impactful moments that might otherwise be
overlooked in some researchers’ quests for the ideal and successful. We want to make the case
for an understanding of the negative as something a priori free of moral or functional value,
and rather encourage its analytical usefulness. This is supported by our case where something
was never absolutely negative (in the sense of bad or undesirable), but only from the relative
perspectives of the enrolled actors.
Up to this point, we have illustrated in our case the circumstances for inscribing that are
dysfunctional, or did not unfold as intended, were deficient or lacking of something. In this
light, it seemed puzzling actors in the project we followed were still able to produce a functional
and deployable dashboard; despite various ‘flaws’, actors were able to establish “transparency”
for central actors in the top management team of CloudOps as well as approximately 100 ser-
vice managers spread across the organization and different countries. This suggests that nega-
tives are not per se or unchangeably problematic. How could, despite the prevalence of numer-
ous negatives, something positive emerge? Given the variety of substantial and transforma-
tional negatives at work in our case, an explanation that appeals to the engaging, performative
effects of representational absences seems to fall short here. What is missing?
48
Throughout the development of the dashboard in our case, individuals noticeably make con-
sistent use of technologies and techniques that draw on some form of visuals. In fact, this hap-
pened to the extent that visualizing did not serve simply to reflect or represent reasoning, but
fabricate it. Thinking, speaking and doing were in many instances inherently visual activities.
This included the explication of knowledge on colored sticky notes, their arrangement on flip-
charts and walls, and the use of PowerPoint to draft the setup of the project team or to draw the
dashboard; visuals were involved in the immediate editing of the digital dashboard on screen
as well as the design and arrangement of its various functional elements. This visual work
helped the project team scrutinize and validate knowledge, imagine how the final product
should look, and guide the team toward imperfect aspects which required more work before the
envisioned final picture could be realized. While some studies have investigated representa-
tional and performative aspects of visuals in inscriptions (Busco & Quattrone, 2018; Quattrone,
2009, 2017), only a few studies have looked at visuals in inscribing (such as Bloomfield &
Vurdubakis, 1997; Busco & Quattrone, 2015; Chua, 1995; Qu & Cooper, 2011). When it comes
to the role of negatives at the site of inscribing, we know even less (Andon et al., 2007; Dambrin
& Robson, 2011; Themsen & Skærbæk, 2018). Negatives made a somewhat chaotic appearance
in the study of inscribing so far, and the reasons for them leading to either desirable (Andon et
al., 2007; Busco & Quattrone, 2015; Dambrin & Robson, 2011; Jordan et al., 2018; Martinez
& Cooper, 2019; Quattrone, 2017) or undesirable (Christensen et al., 2019; Lowe & Koh, 2007)
outcomes during inscribing still largely evade our understanding.
We suggest that the inclusion of visualizing into an analysis of negatives in inscribing
helps detangle a part of that chaos. While prior studies have overwhelmingly focused on the
translation of positive actants, that is, those human and non-human elements that are present,
complete, desirable and functional, the involvement of absences, incompleteness, flaws and the
like in translation has been relatively underemphasized. This omission of prior literature is sur-
prising since, as specified by Latour, “An actant can literally be anything provided it is granted
to be the source of an action.” (1996, p. 373), allowing for radical analytical flexibility of that
which is involved in translations. On that basis, we expose imagination, apportionment, reifi-
cation and adjournment as four modes of visualizing that involve negatives in the translation
of strong explanations.
Imagination allows those involved in inscribing to visually speculate about meaningful
realities that could emerge from, around, or despite of negatives. In our case, at the beginning
of the dashboard workshop, there was uncertainty as to the primary audience of the dashboard.
49
While prior discussions pointed to service managers, top managers who had issued the devel-
opment of the dashboard were important stakeholders as well. It was not clear to the meeting
participants how to determine the correct type of information to be included in the dashboard.
However, when they started to use “personas” to see the dashboard with the eyes of others, such
as service managers or product owners, the meeting gained momentum. Actors could suddenly
imagine people (who they personally knew) in these roles and imagine what they would want
to know, which questions they would ask, and where their attention would go. Inspired by these
‘borrowed realities’, actors then created charts and other visual representations that would help
future users understand, utilize, and trust the numbers in the dashboard. Beyond that, simulating
and comparing the realities of others enabled actors to increase efficiency in the workshop, as
they concluded that the top manager perspective was not distinct but reducible to the others.
This decreased complexity in subsequent creative activities.
Imagination as a mode of visualizing draws attention to a problematic issue in or around
inscribing, helps actors immerse themselves in interim realities, and align their vision to these
realities. Similar to Busco & Quattrone’s (2015) visual performable space it allows them to
come up with solutions that could not have been found if they had stuck to the constraints of
their actual realities. When the negative becomes unproblematic, the interim realities, either
one or multiple patched together, have finally effected a strengthening of the inscription and
became permanent.
Apportionment keeps competing forces that are present in inscribing from expanding
uncontrollably beyond their domain and allows them to productively coexist. For the production
of strong inscriptions – complex, higher-order ones in particular – knowledges of diverse na-
tures are usually involved. The service management dashboard in our case, being of highly
technological substance, is no exception. Simon’s methodological competency was required to
familiarize CloudOps managers with Analytics’ best practice procedures and foster creativity
techniques which could help effectively build the dashboard. At least equally important was the
business knowledge of John and his team to get the right numbers into the dashboard, and in
the right way. Further, actors in more technical roles, initially weakly tied to the project, became
powerful when Simon asked them to identify data sources and create pipelines between them
so that accounting numbers could flow into the data repository feeding the dashboard. Each of
these parties acted as an authority in itself. Still, there was no open clash between them, no
constant cutting short of others that would have sustainably slowed down progress or even put
the project at risk. Discourse could flow as the visuals constantly surrounding the actors, be it
50
computer screens, whiteboards, sticky notes or the dashboard itself, apportioned parts of the
discussion to one or another authority, temporarily declaring them head of the discussion. In
almost all occasions we observed, all actors had one or multiple screens in front of them. In
virtual meetings, actors could project what they were seeing on their screen to the others. When
the PowerPoint mock-up of the dashboard was on screen, Simon did most of the talking, dis-
cussing visual aspects or presenting changes he had made. When John went through emails he
had received from service managers that provided feedback on early versions of the dashboard,
he interpreted the feedback and what it meant for the further refinement of the dashboard. An-
other example is when, in the workshop, colored sticky notes were assigned to the actors. When
attention turned to a particular note, the color of that note let the group trace its origin back to
the author who then elaborated on it.
Quattrone (2017) shifts our attention to the visual turn that is happening in studies of
accounting. Actors are immersed in inherently visual cultures (Mitchell, 2002). In these worlds,
including those that make up the sites of inscribing, a set of shapes, such as lines, circles, or
boxes is in near-infinite permutations instantiated regularly on the basis of some technology.
Such shapes order the world in meaningful ways (Quattrone, 2009, 2017), one of which is the
separation of elements. During the construction of inscriptions, many of such separating shapes
are encountered. Since attention of the observer can only be on one object at the same time, the
separations contained in visuals demarcate domains of authority. They declare to the audience
who is to speak and who is to listen at a particular moment in time, depending on that which is
seen. Others, however, can still interject and relate to elaborations of the incumbent authority,
so that debate remains possible. By ensuring that each authority can bring in their expertise and
is not silenced by the others, inscribing can unfold in both an effective and efficient manner. It
can support stability, mobility and combinability of the outcome.
By reification, visuals make thoughts visible and abstract concepts tangible. Flaws in
thinking or important aspects that had gone unnoticed are spelled out and subject to scrutiny.
Over the course of the dashboard project, ideas that were uttered and discussed could then be
validated. This was especially the case in the workshop when Simon, John, and the managers
involved put down the business questions they could come up with on sticky notes. Some of
these were later, when clustered on the whiteboard, discussed within the team and deemed im-
plausible or irrelevant for the target audience. The sticky notes became mobile pieces of
knowledge that could move around the room; they could be clustered, discussed, converted into
charts, or discarded. Having the thoughts of the others visualized in front of him, Simon could
51
already at this early point estimate that the information required to answer some of the questions
was not retrievable from available databases, or at least not in readily extractable form. Further,
making abstract ideas tangible helped enroll those uninvolved in inscribing and helped them
understand (Yakura, 2013). Discussing technical aspects with software developers or database
experts, Simon’s PowerPoint-visualizations (usually flow charts) of complex and interrelated
technological infrastructures allowed these technical authorities to understand the situation. It
encouraged them to reflect upon and elaborate in which ways changes would have to applied.
Further, at the very beginning of the project, Simon had sketched out in PowerPoint which
people from which departments he imagined to be necessary to develop the dashboard. He had
even put stylized icons of people on a slide, in different colors, and arranged them around an
ellipse that somewhat resembled a table. This slide was used to explain to outsiders how he
envisioned the project, including the researchers and John’s team when they met for the first
time. In another instance, in his call with an expert from the controlling department, the expert
immediately recognized what Simon was looking for when he projected the mock-up of the
dashboard to her screen and used it to explain which report he was looking for. This helped
Simon quickly identify and acquire a supplementary report that would enable him to include
trustworthy numbers into the dashboard.
Reifying abstract and fuzzy concepts makes them tangible and thus understandable and
subject to scrutiny. Actors use visual reifications to engage themselves and engage others. They
thereby establish strong ties between the translated contexts and the translation. People see how
the translation traces back to that in the distance, spatial or otherwise (Corvellec et al. 2018).
Its representation thus convinces them to believe in the inscription. When traces are weak, ac-
tors can employ techniques such as ambivalence, opacity, bricolage, and practical actions to
still facilitate translation (Dambrin & Robson, 2011). Putting ideas under scrutiny during in-
scribing helps validate them and make sure they work in practice, and thus stabilize inscriptions.
Often, this clarification is not only needed for actors to explain their ideas to others, but also to
clarify and complete them to themselves. In these ways, visualizing can resolve or bypass neg-
atives that harm the translation of strong explanations.
Finally, adjournment shifts attention away from negatives that impede inscribing so that
less problematic aspects, whose discussion will hopefully make the problem appear in new
light, can be addressed first. Similar to a complicated trial in court, situations involving complex
social interaction, including inscribing, can give rise to quite intricate circumstances in which
a satisfactory solution seems out of reach. In the dashboard workshop we observed, issues that
52
could not be solved on the spot were set aside and addressed later. As can be seen in figure 2,
such issues were written on sticky notes and sorted to the right edge of the flipchart – a place
where they would not distract the creative focus, but also not be forgotten. These issues also
had the chance to become irrelevant and be simply discarded, as in cases where it turned out
that their solution was a corollary of the solution of another issue. Time invested into these
issues would have been sunk costs, cannibalizing the time available for the solution of easier
and at least equally important problems. Further, revisiting the struggle between Simon and
John regarding automation, the team then had the chance, when tensions arose, to shift their
attention to the visual setup of the dashboard and leave the problematic technical aspect aside
for some time. To provide a last example, in the workshop, the prioritization of the service
manager “persona” over the others allowed the group to build the dashboard from that perspec-
tive when they later recognized that the general manager persona could be collapsed into the
service manager persona and thus would not have to be addressed to the same extent.
The adjournment of problematic, conflict-laden issues leaves room for solvable prob-
lems to be addressed and solutions to emerge. Visualization can shift attention in the here and
now to other, more easily solvable things and thus prevent a waste of resources. The time saved
can instead be allocated to other important aspects of inscribing that make strong inscriptions
emerge.
6. Conclusion
In our study, we have addressed the role of visualizing in translating negatives during inscrib-
ing. We narrated a nine-month episode of a dashboard development project. This shows how
and in which situations individuals within the project team made use of digital visual technol-
ogies and other auxiliaries. With the help of visuals, actors facilitated discourse within the pro-
ject, and progressed the project towards a deployable version of the dashboard. This and the
prevalence of somewhat problematic circumstances significantly shaped the outcomes of the
project.
Taking a processual perspective on the making of new inscriptions, we show that it can
be insightful to consider, more holistically, the sites of inscribing, with all their facets, dichot-
omies, their (sometimes) paradoxical and (always) complex social ecologies. instead of isolat-
ing accounting inscriptions from them. We could thereby avoid becoming overly focused on
what inscriptions are per se, and instead focus on what they are in relation to the circumstances
of their emergence. What we hoped to have achieved by taking this approach is to not become
53
ignorant towards the social affairs within the networks inscriptions are embedded in and those
networks’ interplays with the nature and becoming of new inscriptions.
Instead, we were able to develop a sound understanding of affairs on site by following
a thematically coherent series of meetings. This enabled us to track the unfolding of the dash-
board project in several steps. It allowed us to follow short-term dynamics, such as situational
shifts in power in discussion, bilateral agreements between individuals, and longer-term devel-
opments, such as the gradually increasing maturity of the dashboard’s form or function, as well
as increasingly integrated knowledge base upon which actors from different domains could base
their understandings and discussions. A deep introspection into the local adaption and enact-
ment of inscribing practices of the actors and their use visual media allowed them to configure
a common vision of the final product, which they could then work towards. Observing these
processes allowed us to witness both the effects and the emergence of performativity in the
nascent dashboard. These are rich practical insights that we encourage further studies to engage
with. In fact, it is these specifics that reveal how actors become enrolled in the translation of
new inscriptions, make them strong, or fail to do so.
We draw on this setting to contribute to the literature in two ways. First, we add to the
literature discussing negatives in accounting inscriptions. Changing our analytical stance
from inscriptions to inscribing, we find that large parts of the discussions in prior literature
on properties such as inaccuracy, absence, or incompleteness refer to the same conceptual
category of substantial negatives, that is, negatives in the substance of inscriptions. Seeing
through a processual lens enables us to see that there is another and often overlooked cate-
gory: transformational negatives allows us to address and talk about that which is unideal in
the conditions producing the substance of inscriptions. In light of what a more processual per-
spective revealed to us, we encourage future research to move from inscriptions to inscribing
and thereby be able to more adequately appreciate temporal and other dynamics as well as social
embeddedness. Second, we introduce four modes in which visualizing translates negatives in
inscribing. Through imagination, apportionment, reification and adjournment, negatives are
actors that become related to other elements present at the site of inscribing. Thereby, they
become part of the representations whose emergence they shape.
While, in this paper, we cast light on the role of visualizing and negatives in inscribing,
much still needs to be understood. More research is required to understand how negatives, be it
incompleteness, inaccuracy or absence, influence the mobility, stability or combinability of in-
scriptions. Negatives are often such just from the relative perspective of certain actors and thus
54
might also not even require to be in some way addressed, neither by visualizing nor otherwise,
but instead allowed to unfold or persist. Beyond that, as we see in our case by the lack of support
Simon received from within Analytics as the center of calculation, not all negatives can be
overcome by visualizing. We conclude here that there is potential to further explore the prop-
erties of negatives in the context of inscribing. What makes them functional, what dysfunc-
tional? How do they complement the positives in inscribing, such as integrity, harmony and
completeness? How do one actors’ negatives become another actors’ positives? How do the
modes of visualizing feed back to the negatives they help to translate? As we see, modes of
visualizing in inscribing cannot help to explain all moments of translation that happen around
negatives in nascent accounting inscriptions. Also, we see in prior literature that there are other
mechanisms present at the site of inscribing that mediate the flow of activities. This suggests
that visualizing is only one part of a broader category of mechanisms that facilitate the transla-
tion of distant contexts and make them representable in accounting inscriptions.
The inherently visual worlds that dashboard-builders in our case are embedded in seem
to be phenomena of broader societal and technological changes that have potential to shift at-
tention of decision-makers to a strongly visual mode of thinking and acting. On the one hand,
the emergence of powerful visualizing technologies can facilitate interaction in and around ac-
counting in organizations. On the other hand, we do not fully comprehend how this changes the
understanding of the contexts that are represented: implied in the increase in computational
capacities might be a trend in organizations towards making decision on the basis of accounting
reports, dashboards and other representations that are heavily translated. The reductions that go
along with such representations of increasingly higher orders make complexity and uncertainty
seemingly better manageable, whereas in fact this might lead those using, studying and relying
on accounting and accounts to situations where we are “confronted with instruments harder to
discuss, figures more difficult to doubt, references that are harder to dispute, arrays of stacked
black boxes.” (Latour, 1987, p. 58).
55
References
Adler, P. A., & Adler, P. (2000). Membership roles in field research. A Sage university paper:
Vol. 6. Newbury Park, California: Sage.
Ahrens, T., & Chapman, C. S. (2007). Management accounting as practice. Accounting, Or-
ganizations and Society, 32(1-2), 1–27.
Andon, P., Baxter, J., & Chua, W. F. (2007). Accounting change as relational drifting: A field
study of experiments with performance measurement. Management Accounting Research,
18(2), 273–308.
Bedford, D. S., Malmi, T., & Sandelin, M. (2016). Management control effectiveness and strat-
egy: An empirical analysis of packages and systems. Accounting, Organizations and Society,
51, 12–28.
Bloomfield, B. P., & Vurdubakis, T. (1997). Visions of organization and organizations of vi-
sion: The representational practices of information systems development. Accounting, Or-
ganizations and Society, 22(7), 639–668.
Busco, C., & Quattrone, P. (2015). Exploring How the Balanced Scorecard Engages and Un-
folds: Articulating the Visual Power of Accounting Inscriptions. Contemporary Accounting
Research, 32(3), 1236–1262.
Busco, C., & Quattrone, P. (2018). Performing business and social innovation through account-
ing inscriptions: An introduction. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 67, 15–19.
Callon, M. (2007). What does it mean to say that economics is performative? In D. MacKenzie,
F. Muniesa, & L. Siu (Eds.), Do Economists Make Markets?: On the Performativity of Eco-
nomics (pp. 311–357). Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Christensen, M., Skærbæk, P., & Tryggestad, K. (2019). Contested organizational change and
accounting in trials of incompatibility. Management Accounting Research. Advance online
publication.
Chua, W. F. (1995). Experts, networks and inscriptions in the fabrication of accounting images:
A story of the representation of three public hospitals. Accounting, Organizations and Soci-
ety, 20(2-3), 111–145.
Corvellec, H., Ek, R., Zapata, P., & Zapata Campos, M. J. (2018). Acting on distances: A to-
pology of accounting inscriptions. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 67, 56–65.
Czarniawska, B. (2004). On Time, Space, and Action Nets. Organization, 11(6), 773–791.
Dambrin, C., & Robson, K. (2011). Tracing performance in the pharmaceutical industry: Am-
bivalence, opacity and the performativity of flawed measures. Accounting, Organizations
and Society, 36(7), 428–455.
Demartini, M. C., & Otley, D. (2019). Beyond the system vs. package dualism in Performance
Management Systems design: A loose coupling approach. Accounting, Organizations and
Society, 101072.
Denzin, N. K. (1978). The research act: A theoretical introduction to sociological methods (2.
ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Emerson, R. M., Fretz, R. I., & Shaw, L. L. (1995). Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press.
Eppler, M. J., & Platts, K. W. (2009). Visual Strategizing. Long Range Planning, 42(1), 42–74.
56
Ezzamel, M., Lilley, S., & Willmott, H. (2004). Accounting representation and the road to com-
mercial salvation. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 29(8), 783–813.
Flick, U. (1992). Triangulation Revisited: Strategy of Validation or Alternative? Journal for
the Theory of Social Behaviour, 22(2), 175–197.
Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.
Grabner, I., & Moers, F. (2013). Management control as a system or a package? Conceptual
and empirical issues. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 38(6-7), 407–419.
Goretzki, L., & Messner, M. (2019). Backstage and frontstage interactions in management ac-
countants' identity work. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 74, 1–20.
Hanseth, O., & Monteiro, E. (1997). Inscribing behaviour in information infrastructure stand-
ards. Information and Organization, 7(4), 183–211.
Hopwood, A. G., & Miller, P. (1994). Accounting as social and institutional practice. Cam-
bridge studies in management: Vol. 24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jordan, S., Mitterhofer, H., & Jørgensen, L. (2018). The interdiscursive appeal of risk matrices:
Collective symbols, flexibility normalism and the interplay of ‘risk’ and ‘uncertainty’. Ac-
counting, Organizations and Society, 67, 34–55.
Justesen, L., & Mouritsen, J. (2011). Effects of actor‐network theory in accounting research.
Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, 24(2), 161–193.
Kaplan, S. (2011). Strategy and PowerPoint: An Inquiry into the Epistemic Culture and Ma-
chinery of Strategy Making. Organization Science, 22(2), 320–346.
Kornberger, M., Pflueger, D., & Mouritsen, J. (2017). Evaluative infrastructures: Accounting
for platform organization. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 60, 79–95.
Langley, A., Smallman, C., Tsoukas, H., & van de Ven, A. H. (2013). Process Studies of
Change in Organization and Management: Unveiling Temporality, Activity, and Flow.
Academy of Management Journal, 56(1), 1–13.
Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.
Latour, B. (1988). The Politics of Explanation: An Alternative. In S. Woolgar (Ed.), Knowledge
and reflexivity: New frontiers in the sociology of knowledge (pp. 155–177). London: Sage.
Latour, B. (1996). On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications. Soziale Welt, 47(4), 369–
381.
Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. G. (1985). Naturalistic inquiry. Newbury Park, California: Sage.
Lowe, A., & Koh, B. (2007). Inscribing the organization: Representations in dispute between
accounting and production. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 18(8), 952–974.
Lukka, K. (2014). Exploring the possibilities for causal explanation in interpretive research.
Accounting, Organizations and Society, 39(7), 559–566.
Malmi, T., & Brown, D. A. (2008). Management control systems as a package—Opportunities,
challenges and research directions. Management Accounting Research, 19(4), 287–300.
Martinez, D. E., & Cooper, D. J. (2019). Assembling performance measurement through en-
gagement. Accounting, Organizations and Society. Advance online publication.
Mitchell, W. J.T. (2002). Showing seeing: a critique of visual culture. Journal of Visual Cul-
ture, 1(2), 165–181.
57
Pollock, N., & D’Adderio, L. (2012). Give me a two-by-two matrix and I will create the market:
Rankings, graphic visualisations and sociomateriality. Accounting, Organizations and Soci-
ety, 37(8), 565–586.
Qu, S. Q., & Cooper, D. J. (2011). The role of inscriptions in producing a balanced scorecard.
Accounting, Organizations and Society, 36(6), 344–362.
Quattrone, P. (2009). Books to be practiced: Memory, the power of the visual, and the success
of accounting. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 34(1), 85–118.
Quattrone, P. (2017). Embracing ambiguity in management controls and decision-making pro-
cesses: On how to design data visualisations to prompt wise judgement. Accounting and
Business Research, 47(5), 588–612.
Quattrone, P., & Hopper, T. (2005). A ‘time–space odyssey’: management control systems in
two multinational organisations. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 30(7-8), 735–764.
Robson, K. (1992). Accounting numbers as "inscription": Action at a distance and the develop-
ment of accounting. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 17(7), 685–708.
Robson, K., & Bottausci, C. (2018). The sociology of translation and accounting inscriptions:
Reflections on Latour and Accounting Research. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 54,
60–75.
Star, S. L. (1999). The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3),
377–391.
Themsen, T. N., & Skærbæk, P. (2018). The performativity of risk management frameworks
and technologies: The translation of uncertainties into pure and impure risks. Accounting,
Organizations and Society, 67, 20–33.
Wouters, M., & Sandholzer, M. (2018). How an industry standard may enhance the mediating
capacity of calculations: Cost of ownership in the semiconductor industry. Management Ac-
counting Research, 39, 47–63.
Yakura, E. K. (2013). Visualizing an information technology project: The role of powerpoint
presentations over time. Information and Organization, 23(4), 258–276.
