An investigation of the factors affecting the successful treatment of organisational issues in systems development projects

Abstract

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in the European Journal of Information Systems. The definitive publisher-authenticated version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.ejis.3000401A review of the relevant literature confirms the importance of treating organisational issues in order toud avoid information systems development failures. To investigate how such issues are treated in practice andud the factors associated with their successful treatment, a large-scale survey was conducted. A questionnaireud was mailed to senior IS executives and over 600 responses were received. A majority of the respondentsud (60%) perceived that organisational issues were more important than technical issues and a similar proportionud reported treating these issues explicitly, although there was noticeable variation in the frequencyud with which specific types of issues were treated. However, only 50% felt that organisational issues wereud successfully dealt with in more than 30% of the projects for which they were responsible. This proportionud seems to be independent of the type of organisation or the general development approach adopted, but theud results also indicate that using an approach to treating organisational issues which is explicit, frequent andud covers a wide range of specific issues is associated with higher levels of success. These results suggestud that senior IT executives need to go further in ensuring that the treatment of organisational issues is givenud greater time, resource and level of priority