Chris Sauer

25th anniversary edition

A t the Journal of Information Technology (JIT), we print an editorial only for special issues and special occasions. This issue sees the completion of our 25th full volume and as such we are treating it as cause for celebration – hence our silver anniversary cover. It is all too obvious that the world of information technology (IT), has been transformed since 1986. Indeed, the technology then was hardly pervasive – personal computers were in their infancy. While there were many predictions, nobody could say with confidence how the technology and its use in organisations and society would play out. E-mail was clunky, expert systems were attracting much attention and artificial intelligence was the sexy field in which to work. Nobody talked of knowledge management, business process re-engineering, websites or browsers, enterprise systems or social networking. Indeed, though outsourcing had existed since the very start of business computing, in 1986 the term had not yet entered common currency. So, the last 25 years have given those working in the field of information systems (IS) an enormously stimulating roller coaster ride. So, with the dominant issues in the field changing by the year it has been exhilarating but also very challenging to take the JIT on a journey to establish its identity and place among the leading journals in information systems. And just as the past has been unpredictable, the signs are that the future will not be easy either for academic journals or for the field of information systems. Time, then, to do some reflection. This issue aims to capture that unpredictability while this editorial takes some of the points in the articles and relates them to the journal’s aspirations for the future. While we may not be able to say precisely where we are going or where we will be 25 years from now, we know the compass by which we shall navigate. Starting, then, with this issue, we asked Allen Lee if he would, as a senior scholar, write both a retrospective and a prospective assessment of the information systems field. He has produced – Retrospect and Prospect: Information Systems Research in the Last and Next 25 Years. Here, he poses a challenge – that our development of knowledge should be more constructivist and design science oriented than at present but from within our typical locus in universities, viz in the business schools and commerce faculties. Unlike, say, organisational behaviour, the field has not been stable for long enough for all its knowledge to be built cumulatively by hypothetico-deductive research. But, this is a provocation to the established disciplines and also a challenge to the IS journals. Can we achieve and retain sufficient respectability in the eyes of our peers while operating under different epistemic norms? Allen Lee shows that taken-for-granted concepts such as ‘information’, ‘theory’, ‘system’, ‘organization’, and ‘relevance’ need to be rethought and poses the challenge that the future development of the IS field may be better modelled on the research disciplines found in the professions, including medicine, engineering, architecture, and law. His insights and provocations are commented upon and extended by four interlocutors. Writing as a declared IS ‘native’, Mats Lundeberg is sympathetic to Lee’s perspective and focuses on the ramifications for research approaches, in particular commenting on problematising ‘theories in use’ and ‘espoused theories’, balancing prescriptions and general direction, and working with different levels of abstraction. Richard Baskerville welcomes Lee’s revisiting of systems theory but also argues that, in Lee’s perspective, technology seems more conceptually separated from organisational systems than reality might allow, and invites a further extension of Lee’s concerns on ‘organization’. Baskerville also offers a nuanced deliberation on the role of theory in IS, and points to the challenges involved in the anxiety to ‘scienc-ify’ the IS field, and the gulf between what and how IS is researched, and how it is taught, agreeing the need to anchor future scientific studies to problems of practice, but by anchoring bridges on both sides of the gulf. In his response to Allen Lee’s paper, Robert Davison argues that in some respects the changes need to be more radical than Lee suggests, including in the way Ph.D. students are trained, in the selection criteria for new teachers, and how leading journals support different types of research. Davison goes on to argue that emerging markets, particularly India and China, may also change approaches and assumptions in the IS field, though he worries that at the moment, a Western intellectual hegemony is being perpetuated in these countries rather than being reshaped. He employs a number of insights into the culture and politics of the IS field to support this contention, and suggests more context-sensitive problem shaping and research is necessary, and more questioning of dogmatic beliefs and taken-for-granted assumptions that are rife in the IS field. Chrisanthi Avgerou extends Davison’s concerns by arguing for richness and diversity in the IS field. She questions Lee’s suggested programme, wondering about the validity of the detection of common theories-in-use for a few fundamental concepts across the whole IS field, and also wary of its consequences. She argues that, in fact, the coexistence of alternative theories for an observed phenomenon is the norm rather than the exception, both in the natural and the social sciences. Moreover, there are institutional obstacles to publishing some types of research, for example, well founded socio-theoretical research, and design research. These obstacles should not be misdiagnosed Journal of Information Technology (2010) 25, 333–335 & 2010 JIT Palgrave Macmillan All rights reserved 0268-3962/10

The impact of size and volatility on IT project performance

Studying the factors influencing project risk.

Information technology in complex health services: organizational impediments to successful technology transfer and diffusion.

OBJECTIVE To identify impediments to the successful transfer and implementation of packaged information systems through large, divisionalized health services. DESIGN A case analysis of the failure of an implementation of a critical application in the Public Health System of the State of New South Wales, Australia, was carried out. This application had been proven in the United States environment. MEASUREMENTS Interviews involving over 60 staff at all levels of the service were undertaken by a team of three. The interviews were recorded and analyzed for key themes, and the results were shared and compared to enable a continuing critical assessment. RESULTS Two components of the transfer of the system were considered: the transfer from a different environment, and the diffusion throughout a large, divisionalized organization. The analyses were based on the Scott-Morton organizational fit framework. In relation to the first, it was found that there was a lack of fit in the business environments and strategies, organizational structures and strategy-structure pairing as well as the management process-roles pairing. The diffusion process experienced problems because of the lack of fit in the strategy-structure, strategy-structure-management processes, and strategy-structure-role relationships. CONCLUSION The large-scale developments of integrated health services present great challenges to the efficient and reliable implementation of information technology, especially in large, divisionalized organizations. There is a need to take a more sophisticated approach to understanding the complexities of organizational factors than has traditionally been the case.

A Temporal Model of Information Technology Project Performance

Efficiently delivering expected performance from information technology projects remains a critical challenge for many organizations. Improving our understanding of how various factors influence project performance is therefore an important research objective. This study proposes and tests a temporal model of information technology project performance (TMPP). It shows that performance can be better understood by separating risk factors into earlier (a priori) risk factors and later (emergent) risk factors, and modeling the influence of the former on the latter. Project performance, the dependent variable, is measured by considering both process (budget and schedule) and product (outcome) components. The model includes interactions between risk factors, project management practices, and project performance components. The model is tested using partial least squares analysis with data from a survey of 194 project managers. Our results indicate that the TMPP increases explanatory power when compared with models that link risk factors directly to project performance. The results show the importance for active risk management of recognizing, planning for, and managing a priori and emergent risk factors. The finding of a strong relationship between structural risk factors and subsequent volatility shows the need for risk management practice to recognize the interaction of a priori and emergent risk factors. The results confirm the importance of knowledge resources, organizational support, and project management practices, and demonstrate the ways in which they reinforce each other.

Unreasonable expectations – NHS IT, Greek choruses and the games institutions play around mega-programmes

O ur current issue focusses on an area in the application of information technology (IT) that is critical for both society and the modern economy – health. In particular, we focus on the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom where ongoing national and local programmes have attracted widespread national and international attention. Exploitation of information offers benefits in numerous ways. Remote monitoring of heart conditions via the technology of telemedicine can bring patients to the hospital before a critical incident occurs. 3-D modelling can give doctors better images of the body by which to target therapies. Results reporting systems offer more rapid access to test results. Patient administration and booking systems facilitate efficient and effective administration. Shared medical record systems can make available essential history to maximise the probability of appropriate treatment in emergencies. Information mining can identify optimal clinical pathways to achieve the most successful ways of diagnosing and treating specific sets of symptoms. The e-health vision is clinically, economically, socially and politically attractive. No country has found it easy to realise this vision of fully informatised health. Many reasons have contributed. The professional bureaucratic structure embodies tensions between clinicians and managers. Political interference has been widespread. State health systems tend to be large, so the IT projects are large and by definition risky. Investment in systems as against investment in hospitals and treatments is hard to justify. Re-thinking and reengineering the practice of health has too often been ignored in favour of the optimistic, though false, belief that implementing new IT alone will suffice. Looming over us is the shadow of the UK NHS’s continuing mega-programme, the National Programme for IT. It serves as a fascinating case study for this issue. It also raises questions about mega-programmes that have wider importance for our journal. The traditional approach of academics and consultants to analysing such a case is to contrast progress against plans and outcomes against targets, and to analyse what deficiencies of project management have led to the sub-optimal result achieved. More recently, though, there has been some emerging discourse in both practice and the Academy arguing for a more realistic approach to targets and to the assessment of performance. Bent Flyvbjerg and his colleagues (Flyvbjerg et al., 2003) talk of strategic optimism – the practice of understating costs and overstating benefits. The concept of optimism bias is in common usage among practitioners as a problem for which the antidote is the business case. Indeed, the UK Government’s Office of Government Commerce would claim that it explicitly includes allowance for optimism bias in its business cases (Office of Government Commerce, 2007). But we have seen too many optimistic business cases to believe that they consistently embody realistic assessments of what is possible (Sauer, 1993; Willcocks and Lester, 1999). So, if programmes too often start with unrealistic targets, the problem of project performance can be turned on its head and viewed as productively as a problem of misplaced expectations as a problem of mismanagement. This reversal of the analytical focus is most obviously worthy of investigation in the case of mega-projects and programmes where the sheer scale almost necessarily implies that progress will not be to plan, and outcomes will not be those originally agreed. Journal of Information Technology (2007) 22, 195–201 & 2007 JIT Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. All rights reserved 0268-3962/07

Establishing the Business of the Future:: the Role of Organizational Architecture and Information Technologies

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Where Project Managers are Kings

In the past, when the commercial world was relatively stable and the future plannable, organizational structure was appropriately the principal instrument of strategy. Now that strategy is more about intent than long-term plans, more about pasting and prototyping than planning for D-Day, companies need to start preparing for the future differently. The paper arises from a 98-corporation study of building e-business infrastructure. A particularly complex and pervasive issue was the fit between technology infrastructure and strategic intent and structure. Several companies were observed to be developing what we call here an Organizational Architecture capability to manage the problems they experienced. Here, using the case study base, we develop the rationale and content of such a capability, and show its key tie in to leveraging IT applications and infrastructure.

Modeling the knowledge perspective of IT projects

Australian construction projects today are usually more successful than information technology (IT) projects. One reason lies in the way construction companies manage project management. Based on in-depth research of four successful construction companies, this paper describes a project management-centered organizational form. It describes the organizational and management arrangements that support project performance and the individual and organizational capabilities that underpin sustained project success. This particular form of organization is shown to be stable and effective because its constituent arrangements are logically consistent and mutually reinforcing. The authors show how many of these arrangements can be adopted by IT service firms and in-house IT organizations to improve their performance on projects.

Validating the defect detection performance advantage of group designs for software reviews: report of a laboratory experiment using program code

Information technology (IT) projects are often viewed as arenas in which action is paramount, and tasks, budgets, people, and schedules need to be managed and controlled to achieve expected results. This perspective is useful because it encourages the project manager to scope work, manage time and budget, and monitor progress. Another perspective views a project as a place where learning and knowledge is paramount. In this view, projects are seen as a conduit for knowledge, which enters through people, methodologies, and prior learning. During the project, knowledge must be transferred, integrated, created, and exploited to create new organizational value. Knowledge is created, and knowledge can be lost. Within an IT project, this focus on knowledge yields new insights, because IT projects are primarily knowledge work. From this perspective, the project managers primary task is to combine multiple sources of knowledge about technologies and business processes to create organizational value. These and other views of the IT project are complementary. However, this article focuses only on the knowledge perspective, leaving aside other views. This article is designed to bring together the empirical literature, which has investigated the impact of knowledge perspectives on IT project performance, and to suggest a temporal model of this perspective. In the first part of this article, we consider the knowledge-based view of an IT project and suggest definitions and a typology of knowledge. Then the knowledge risks model (Reich, 200?) is used as a framework within which to collect and examine the empirical data that support the knowledge-based view of an IT project. In the third part of this article, the problem of modeling knowledge and learning within IT projects is addressed. The study begins with the Temporal Model of IT Project Performance (Gemino, Reich, & Sauer, 2008) and discusses evidence that its knowledge-based constructs and subconstructs are influential with respect to project performance. The article ends by proposing a temporal model of the knowledge perspective of an IT project. There are five constructs in this model: knowledge resources, knowledge creation, knowledge loss, project performance, and learning. The content of these constructs and their expected interaction is discussed. Although this stream of work is at its early stages, hopefully it will convince researchers that further investigation into knowledge and learning within projects is warranted because it has the potential to impact both the theory and performance of IT projects.

Strategic alignment revisited: connecting organizational architecture and IT infrastructure

It is widely accepted that software development technical reviews (SDTRs) are a useful technique for finding defects in software products. Recent debates centre around the need for review meetings (Porter and Votta 1994, Porter et al 1995, McCarthy et al 1996, Lanubile and Visaggio 1996). This paper presents the findings of an experiment that was conducted to investigate the performance advantage of interacting groups over average individuals and artificial (nominal) groups. We found that interacting groups outperform the average individuals and nominal groups. The source of performance advantage of interacting groups is not in finding defects, but rather in discriminating between true defects and false positives. The practical implication for this research is that nominal groups constitute an alternative review design in situations where individuals discover a low level of false positives.