A Tale of Two Systems: Success and Failure in a Single Information System Implementation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper presents a case study of an information system implementation. The system, a computerized student record system, was introduced into a small university when the university opened. Unlike many other case studies of systems implementation, there was no existing system to replace, thus it was expected that there would be little resistance to the system. Successful implementation was anticipated, particularly as the systems designers were also the primary users. An evaluation of the system shows this was not the case. Two groups of users are identified, one pleased with the system, the other dissatisfied. The secondary users did not display their dissatisfaction with the system by resistance, however. They used the system frequently, but were denied the full access they required to do their jobs. Ostensibly due to technical limitations of the system, the primary users acted as gatekeepers. An examination of the culture and management structure of the university reveals strong political motivations for the primary users to exert power over the secondary users. Markus’s (1983) interpretation of interaction theory is used to discuss the political implications of the system design. It is concluded that senior management must be aware of the importance of information systems to their organizations, and understand the potential for designers to use these systems as sources of power. The case study is reconstructed from the author’s experiences as a staff member at the university during the system implementation, initially as a primary user of the system (but not an active member of the system design team), and later as a secondary user. The case is evaluated from the perspective of both user groups, using a framework derived from the literature on information systems failure and successful systems implementation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".