Laura Parente: Design and implementation of an integrated information system: the case of the COPERNIC programme at the French tax authorities (2001–2006)

This thesis analyses the relationship between the design and implementation of new IT tools aimed at achieving integrated information management within an organisation, and the resulting changes in organisational design and practices.

This is a recurring theme in sociological analysis, the relevance and topicality of which are ensured by successive technological developments that are constantly reshaping the world of work. As a result, new issues regularly emerge and demand the attention of researchers working in this field.

To understand this relationship, we examined how proposals for a new integrated information system and a new organisational model are formulated, and who formulates them, as well as the references made by one project to the other. We are also interested in how the various stakeholders—both internal and external to the organisation, including designers and users of information systems, as well as the organisation’s managers and employees—perceive and position themselves in relation to the two projects, which in a sense represent organisational innovations.

Our aim is to analyse the ‘internal dynamics of innovation’ within a public organisation by examining how, from the late 1990s onwards, one of the ‘most emblematic’ forms of managerial innovation of recent decades—integrated information management—was introduced within the French tax administration.