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Critical Success Factors for Information Systems Implementation: An End-User Perspective
Abstract
Successfully implementing information systems (IS) projects is of critical importance to the prosperity and even survival of modern organizations (Joshia and Laurel, 1998; Umble et al, 2003). This is because an effective use of IS for supporting the operations of modern organizations usually leads to significant improvements in organizational productivity (Mandal and Gunasekaran, 2003) and often provides organizations with crucial competitive advantages (Poon and Wagner, 2000). Numerous IS projects have been initiated, developed and implemented. The evidence for success as reflected in the literature, however, is not particularly encouraging (Ferrat and Starke, 1995; Field, 1997; Hong and Kim, 2002). Ferrat and Starke (1995) find that about thirty percent of the projects studied in the United States produce no benefit to the organization. Field (1997) reveals that twenty-six percent of the projects investigated in the United Kingdom produce very disappointing results, while five percent are complete failures. Implementing IS projects successfully is not easy for any organization. This is because the implementation process often leads to significant organizational changes and may result in fundamental reorganization of the business processes (Joshia and Laurel, 1998; Boddy and Macbeth, 2000). Much research has been carried out, and several theories have evolved in an attempt to understand the critical success factors (CSF) in this regard. These theories focus on aspects such as the impact of external and organizational environments on the IS project development, the extent of alignment between organizational and IS objectives, the social factors affecting the development of IS project plans (Quazi, 1999; Butler and Fitzgerald, 2001), the factors affecting the extent of implementation of IS project plans (Thong, 2001), and the likelihood of success of different IS planning approaches in turbulent organizational environments (Butler and Fitzgerald, 2001). Existing studies, however, hardly show a general agreement on the CSF for the general IS project implementation. More importantly, the end-user perception of the success or failure of the project has not been explored comprehensively. This paper presents an empirical investigation of the CSF for successful IS project implementation from the end-user perspective. A hybrid approach consisting of survey and interview is used for obtaining firsthand experience of the end-user towards their perception of the CSF in IS implementation success. A financial institution in Australia is chosen to carry out the empirical study. As a result, an end-user perception of the CSF can be obtained that would be of practical significance to successful IS project implementation in general. In what follows, we first present a review of the CSF in IS project implementation from the end-user perspective. We then describe the research questions and the methodology used in the empirical study at an Australian financial institution. This is followed by a discussion of the research findings based on the empirical results.
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