What is it about?

Our study of an IS implementation shows that the relative importance of employees beliefs in particular cultural values may increase or decrease the likelihood of IS project success. We show how changes in the relative importance of organisational wide values compared to the values held by subgroups resulted in IT user resistance from some employees. At the pre-implementation stage employees considered the organisational value of 'resiliance' to be important which helped the IT project to a successful launch. But in subsequent stages (implementation and pre-implementation), an increase in saliency of the subcultural values of 'accuracy' and 'superstar' resulted in employees resisting the system, leading to its failure.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

This paper provides fresh insights on how salient subcultural practices can lead to IS failures despite the existence of a strong organisation-wide value. It also answers the call to explore how the saliency of a given cultural perspective may impact on the outcome of an IS implementation.

Perspectives

Taking the evolving and dynamic view of culture helps advance our understanding of IS implementation and how and why IS projects fail or succeed. We recommend that practitioners implementing IS consider not only a ‘top-down’ organisational-level approach but also consider ‘bottom-up’ responses to the implementation process and how this push back may undermine a project that has started well. We hope our study helps IT managers increase their chances of IT project success.

Professor Crispin R Coombs
Loughborough University

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: The Impact of Salient Cultural Practices on the Outcome of IS Implementation, Journal of Global Information Management, January 2017, IGI Global,
DOI: 10.4018/jgim.2017010101.
You can read the full text:

Read

Contributors

The following have contributed to this page