Power, politics, and MIS implementation
Communications of the ACM
The control of information systems developments after implementation
Communications of the ACM - Special section on management of information systems
Automated welfare client-tracking and service integration: the political economy of computing
Communications of the ACM
Power and information technology: a review using metatriangulation
ICIS '00 Proceedings of the twenty first international conference on Information systems
Journal of Management Information Systems
Consumer adoption of group-buying auctions: an experimental study
Information Technology and Management
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Viewing organizations as political coalitions has a long history in management studies and has generated a great deal of research on the roles of organizational politics and power in decision making. Information technology (IT) researchers generally have followed the general trend by providing structural-functional accounts of politics, power, and control strategies. Although such studies underscore the importance, nature, and complexity of politics in IT implementation, they are constrained by the lack of both a general theory of human behavior as well as a model of power that bridges the individual actor and the wider interpersonal/organizational setting. In this paper we present a case study of power and politics in a large financial transactions company, but seen through the lenses of the action science perspective of Argyris and his associates and the model of power developed by A.A. Berle. More specifically, we examine the power vacuum in the IT effort that resulted from the senior executive abrogating his power and failing to delegate it to his subordinates. The resulting political havoc, in turn, caused competition and confusion, wasted effort, and a significant lack of productivity with regard to the implementation of a multimillion-dollar IT effort. We conclude with several hypotheses about how principles of action science and interpersonal power must be used by executives to manage the politics of IT design and implementation.