Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/81348

Title

Learning from a strategic failure

Author(s)

Grainger, Nick;  McKay, Judy;  Marshall, Peter

Abstract

Some years ago Lyytinen and Hirschheim (1987) explored information systems (IS) failure, characterising four different types or modes of failure. This paper re-examines these types of failures in the context of an enterprise system (ES) implementation in an Asia Pacific business that was newly acquired by a global manufacturing company. Following many successful ES implementations in other newly acquired businesses, this implementation encountered many difficulties. Some months after a difficult cut over, the acquiring company commissioned an independent review of the system and subsequently accepted a recommendation to withdraw the ES and allow the business to return to its legacy system. The acquiring company then embarked on a broad based strategy to address the concerns and perceptions upon which the opposition to the system had been based. Subsequently a second implementation was initiated, led by staff of the acquired business themselves. The analysis of this case leads to a new type of failure, namely strategic failure, being added to the set of failure types. The theoretical orientation of the study was social constructionism. To capture, analyse and understand the multiple perspectives explored as a result of using this orientation, a narrative approach was utilised.

Publication type

Conference paper

Research centre

Swinburne University of Technology. Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies

Source

Proceedings of 'Evolving boundaries and new frontiers: defining the IS discipline', the 20th Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS 2009), Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 02-04 December 2009, pp. 362-372

Publication year

2009

FOR Code(s)

0806 Information Systems;  080609 Information Systems Management

Keyword(s)

Case studies;  Enterprise systems implementation;  Information systems implementation failures;  IS failure;  Narrative;  Social constructionism

Publisher

Australasian Association for Information Systems

ISBN

9780646525709

Publisher URL

http://www.infotech.monash.edu.au/about/news/conferences/acis09/Proceedings/proceedings.html

Copyright

Proceedings copyright © 2009 Monash University. This paper copyright © 2009 the authors. The authors assign to ACIS and educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive licence to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The authors also grant a non-exclusive licence to ACIS to publish this document in full in the Conference Papers and Proceedings. Those documents may be published on the World Wide Web, CD-ROM, in printed form, and on mirror sites on the World Wide Web. Any other usage is prohibited without the express permission of the authors.

Peer reviewed