GJSGVol.4

Message From the Editor's Desk

Article One [Case Research]
A case study of Successful Governance System Re-Implementation Against All Odds
Davids Rouven, MIT, USA

Achieving success in enterprise systems (ES) implementations is challenging. The success rate is not high in view of the sums invested by many organizations in these companywide systems. The literature is charged with reasons for unsuccessful implementations, such as a lack of top management support and insufficient change management. Contrary to this research, empirical data from an ES re-implementation in a Scandinavian high-tech company shows successful implementation despite many problematic shifts in outsourcing partners. Therefore, it is natural to ask: why was the re-implementation of the ES at SCANDI successful despite the major troubles encountered during the project? Building on critical success factor (CSF) analysis of ten CSFs combined with an investigation into the institutional structures at play, we present several reasons for the successful implementation. The CSF analysis shows an equivocal result: four fulfilled, three partially fulfilled and three not fulfilled. Even the two top CSFs, top management support and change management, are either not fulfilled or only partial fulfilled. However, the institutional analysis provides additional explanations, such as a few heroes acting as glue in a conflicting multisourcing environment and resilience towards ES implementations created over many years. Important implications from this study are that one should be critical of CSFs and that the combined analysis can guide both practitioners and researchers to understand and position factors better for success in ES implementations.

Article Two [Case Research]
Identifying strategic Risks in Remote Infrastructure Governance
Alison Greg, Huston Institute of Technology, USA

Remote Infrastructure Management Services (RIMS) is a fast growing service in IT which has been outsourced to third party service providers by leading global firms. Service providers in this line face huge challenges because they have to ensure agreed upon service levels by monitoring and controlling the client’s infrastructure from an offshore location. This research paper explores the relatively nascent area of RIMS to identify and categorize service provider risks. The three categories of risks that emerged from this analysis are: (i) Service delivery risks, (ii) Relationship specific risks, and (iii) Macroeconomic risks. There is a close relationship between the first two categories of risks and similar categories of risks in application development. However, dimensions of timeline and requirements uncertainty elicit a different set of risks in RIMS. Relationship maturity, nature of client, contract design, and nature of service are contextual factors which influence the degree of risks in RIMS.

Article Three [Case Research]
Managing Uncertainty and Conflict in Portfolio Governance
Rebacca Robert, University of Liverpool, UK

Research Article four

Impact of strategic Investment on Productivity and Profitability

Arica Royiko , Tokyo Institute of Management – Japan

 The Expert Opinion

An Interview with the President of Omnispan http://www.omnispan.net/

Maximizing the outcome of IT project investments has been a major concern for years. Several approaches have been suggested one of them being Project Portfolio Management (PPM). Even though PPM offers valuable techniques for aligning IT project portfolios with organizational needs and maximizing the outcome of project portfolios, practitioners find it difficult to implement. Our research suggests one of the reasons being the fact that PPM builds upon classic rational ideals about decision-making in organizations that are hard to realize and in some aspects counterproductive for non-routine decision-making. Especially, we focus on the importance of incorporating mechanisms that deal with uncertainty and conflict during portfolio decision-making, and on the importance of identifying and understanding dysfunctional decision-making patterns as part of improving PPM practice. Reducing the reliance on classic rational decision-making ideals and incorporating other decision-making styles more aligned with decision-making practices in organizations might ease PPM implementation and improve the outcome of systematic PPM efforts.
The research is based upon a multisite case study from public sector organizations attempting to improve their PPM capabilities.

Book Review
Blind Spot: A Leader's Guide to IT-Enabled Business Transformation
By Abraham Dell, University of Carleton, Canada