Research Summary
Research Summary
How can General Managers Contribute to IT Success?
Description
US companies are currently spending approximately 5% of their revenue on information technology (IT) each year. Over half of this investment goes to IT intended to change business processes, either within a single enterprise or across several. Hovewer, 30-75% of implementations of these process-enabling information technologies (PEITs) are considered failures. Why is this? There is broad agreement that failures occur for managerial reasons, rather than technical ones. Yet most managerial guidance is in the form of a 'checklist' that implementation managers are supposed to follow to ensure success.
The fundamental problem with this is that all PEIT implementations are not alike, and so can't be managed using any universal checklist, no matter how good. My research on large-scale IT efforts has led me to develop a model that specifies how they differ from each other, what pitalls are most likely for each, and what strategies general managers can adopt to avoid or counter these pitfalls. This model includes indivdual-, group-, and company-level factors. Some results from this work have been published here.