Dependency Restructuring: How Technological Enactment Changes Organizational Requirement Relations

Digital technologies can change organizational work without changing the dependencies through which work is coordinated. This article examines the cases in which those dependencies do change. The analysis separates changes in activities from changes in dependencies and from the coordination needed to manage them. Its main contribution is a bounded meso-level framework that treats dependency restructuring as an independently observable change between technological enactment and subsequent coordination requirements. The framework specifies observable forms of dependency change and derives two conditional propositions. Individual dependency relations may be created, eliminated, or redirected to a different provider; previously separate sets of dependencies may also become connected. The first proposition concerns situations in which local autonomy increases while reliance on a shared technological or external capability also increases. The second concerns situations in which different technologies produce similar coordination requirements because they generate similar dependency configurations under similar organizational conditions. Two evidence-based illustrations—enterprise cloud migration and artificial intelligence integration in organizational workflows—show how the approach can be applied without treating the cases as tests of the theory. The article also provides an empirical identification procedure for distinguishing activity change, dependency change, and coordination response.