Managing critical success factors for IS implementation: A stakeholder engagement and control perspective

• Author: Vinod Kumar,Zafor Ahmed,Uma Kumar
• Published date: 01 September 2018
• Date: 01 September 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/cjas.1441

Managing critical success factors for IS

implementation: A stakeholder engagement

and control perspective

Zafor Ahmed*

Carleton University

Uma Kumar

Carleton University

Vinod Kumar

Carleton University

Abstract

Enterprise information systems (IS) implementation is often

part of an organization’s strategic IT initiatives and requires

a large investment of organizational resources, yet may

fail due to inadequate management of critical success

factors (CSF). Using a revelatory case study of a multi-

partner COTS implementation process by a large Canadian

government organization, this research investigates

successful management of CSF through optimal stakeholder

engagement and a balancing of control conf‌igurations.

This research identif‌ies four distinct project orientations

related to stakeholder engagements—strategic,

responsibility, harmony, and persuasion—that can be of

signif‌icant value in managing CSF and other challenges

during implementation and post-implementation phases. In

addition to the identif‌ication of a need for control balancing

in a multi-partner IS implementation, three key drivers

responsible for triggering control balancing are identif‌ied:

(a) shared understanding, (b) negative anticipation, and

(c) deviation of expectations. Copyright © 2017 ASAC.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: IS implementation, packaged software,

stakeholder engagement, inter-organizational systems,

control balancing

Résumé

Dans les entreprises, la mise en place des systèmes

d’information (SI) fait souvent partie des initiatives

stratégiques en matière de technologies de l’information

(TI). Même si cette mise en place nécessite d’importants

investissements en ressources organisationnelles, son

succès n’est pas toujours garanti en raison d’une gestion

inappropriée des facteurs de réussite décisifs (FRD). Dans

cet article, nous nous appuyons sur l’étude de cas d’un

processus de mise en place, par une importante

organisation gouvernementale, d’un produit commercial

sur étagère (COTS) réunissant plusieurs partenaires, pour

examiner la gestion réussie des FRD à travers

l’engagement optimal des parties intéressées et un

équilibrage des mécanismes de contrôle. Notre étude

permet de mettre en évidence quatre facteurs distincts liés

àl’engagement des parties intéressées à savoir la

stratégie, la responsabilité, l’harmonie et la persuasion.

Ces quatre facteurs sont susceptibles de jouer un rôle

crucial dans la gestion des FRD et des déf‌is auxquels on

pourrait faire face pendant ou après la mise en place du

SI. Nous montrons également que lors de la mise en œuvre

des SI réunissant plusieurs partenaires, il importe de

rééquilibrer les mécanismes de contrôle qui doivent être

déclenchés par trois éléments clés à savoir: (a) la

compréhension mutuelle (b) l’anticipation négative et (c)

la déviation des attentes. Copyright © 2017 ASAC.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Mots-clés : mise en place des SI, logiciel prêt à l’emploi,

engagement des parties intéressées, systèmes

interorganisationnels, équilibrage des contrôles

One dimension of the Canadian government’s operating

cost reduction in information technology (IT) has been via

optimizing procurement policies, which revolve around the

*Please address correspondence to: Zafor Ahmed, Carleton University,

Sprott School of Business, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S

5B6, Canada. Email: zafor.ahmed@gmail.com

Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences

Revue canadienne des sciences de l’administration

35: 403–418 (2018)

Published online 11 April 2017 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/CJAS.1441

Can J Adm Sci

35(3), 403–418 (2018)Copyright © 2017 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 403

options of reuse and buy, or build. Given the public sector

business model, buying often appears to be the cheaper

alternative. This requires the purchase and implementation

of commercially available packaged solutions, commonly

known as COTS (commercial off the shelf) solutions. Key

marketing features of COTS components are cost savings,

ease of integration and extension, reliability, and capability

(Newcomb, 2007). However, because COTS vendors

usually develop software with a general audience in mind,

adopting and implementing COTS to replace a legacy

system or to support existing business processes requires a

different tactic compared to custom-developed, in-house

solutions. This often makes COTS implementation a riskier

alternative, for unique business rules and logic required by

legacy systems might not be suff‌iciently supported without

considerable customization.

COTS differs from traditional software development

projects or enterprise systems implementation projects in

several key ways, such as required level of functional and

technical expertise available within an organization, level

of integration complexities, the vendor’s degree of

engagement, and degree of control over the vendor. Yet this

process for the non-enterprise resource planning (ERP)

family of COTS has not been well examined in the literature.

From the perspective of critical success factors (CSF),

stakeholder engagement, control balancing, and adding

multiple partners and third-party consulting f‌irms to the host

organization and COTS vendor makes the implementation

process even more complicated.

Research concentrating on the individual aspect of

ERP/Information Systems (IS) implementation, such as

CSF identif‌ication, implementation process, or application

of various controls, is quite substantial, but largely non-

existent is investigation of the CSF management by

optimally engaging stakeholders and balancing control by

applying different control conf‌igurations (Finney & Corbett,

2007). Enterprise COTS implementation projects are often

part of an organization’s strategic IT initiatives and require

a large investment of organizational resources, yet often

fail due to inadequate management of CSF and other

implementation-specif‌ic challenges.

Collectively, this existing knowledge gap around the

COTS implementation process, the opportunity for better

understanding successful management of CSF, and balancing

control at different stages of a project acted as the primary

motivational forces behind the current investigation. In

this study, we have examined two distinct aspects of a

multi-partner enterprise COTS implementation, which can

be summarized in two research questions:

1) How can CSF and other challenges be successfully

managed through optimal stakeholder engagement or

orientation by the project team?

2) Why is control balancing essential for multi-partner

COTS implementation projects?

This paper is divided into f‌ive sections. Section 2

presents the case of an enterprise COTS implementation.

Section 3 discusses the research methodology employed

for this study. Section 4 describes the case details from an

implementation perspective. The f‌inal section summarizes

this work and then considers contributions to scholarship,

applied implications, limitations, and future research

directions.

The Case

Our case involves a two-year project where a Canadian

government department in collaboration with two other

government departments (hereafter the Tri-agency) acted as

the client, and a well-known, top-tier solution integrator

from North America partnered with a COTS vendor located

in Dublin, Ireland to implement a packaged software

solution to handle f‌inancial regulations. Besides the complex

nature of the implementation process and large group of

stakeholders involved, the fact that the project was awarded

the GTEC (Government Technology) Distinction Award in

2015for excellence in government-service delivery also

motivated us to select it for the current research.

1

The primary purpose of the Tri-agency Database

System Renewal (TDSR) project was to replace with a

COTS solution a legacy system used by the Tri-agency.

The legacy system was predominantly used to collect,

validate, and maintain f‌inancial data and f‌inancial returns

f‌iled by federally regulated deposit-taking institutions.

It was developed in 1998 and had undergone several

enhancements since its deployment, yet appeared to be

incapable of adapting to the increasing quantity and

complexity of data collection and management needs. A

COTS replacement for the existing system was proposed

to increase corporate effectiveness by improving the

Tri-agency’s ability to collect and analyze data, and to

maximize the use and availability of collected data by

greatly reducing processing time and extending distribution

capabilities. Although an in-house development was initially

considered as an option, key motivators for selecting a

COTS product by Tri-agency can be attributed to three

factors: (a) organizational resource requirement to support

the implementation, (b) project completion time, and (c)

use of a COTS product for a similar purpose by peer

organizations at different countries.

Research Methodology

We conducted a single case study to analyze an example

of successful COTS implementation that employed

stakeholder engagement and control-balancing perspectives

to identify how they inf‌luenced CSF at different phases.

The choice of adopting a case-study method was motivated

CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS AND IS IMPLEMENTATION AHMED ET AL.

Can J Adm Sci

35(3), 403–418 (2018)Copyright © 2017 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 404