Client Control in IS Projects
From Information Systems at Pitt Business
IS projects continue to be difficult to manage and requires the involvement of business users for project success. Often, to improve the success of a project, the project is championed by a business manager and is ultimately owned by the business unit. As such, the liaison(s) from the business unit have a significant role in providing oversight and direction in the project to assure its successful completion. The role of this liaison is different from a user participant, and involves more oversight and the use of controls.
These liaisons are able to implement both formal and informal modes of control to motivate individuals to work in a manner to achieve a desired outcome. However, most research in control has assumed a hierarchical relationship between the business liaison and the IS department users, whereas this relationship can often be more lateral and not involve specified organizational oversight of the project to business liaisons. This paper reports that client liaisons exercise outcome control when outcome measurability is high. Also, this relationship is not affected by the expertise of the liaison about the systems development process.
[edit] Abstract
Increasingly, business clients are actively leading information systems (IS) projects, often in collaboration with IS professionals, and they are exercising a greater degree of project control. Control is defined as all attempts to motivate individuals to achieve desired objectives, and it can be exercised via formal and informal modes. Much of the previous research investigating the choice of control mode has focused on direct reporting relationships between IS project leaders and their superiors in a hierarchical setting. However, the client-IS relationships may take on a variety of forms, including both hierarchical and lateral settings. Moreover, prior research has found that the knowledge of the systems development process is a key antecedent of control, yet clients are unlikely to be as knowledgeable as IS professionals about this process. It is therefore unclear whether prior findings will generalize to the client-IS pair, and the goal of this research is to examine the exercise of control across this relationship. Data were gathered from a questionnaire survey of 69 pairs of clients and IS project leaders. The results are largely consistent with prior research on the antecedents of formal control modes, but they shed new insight on the choice of informal control modes.
[edit] Paper Information
Authors: Laurie Kirsch, V. Sambamurthy, Dong-Gil Ko, Russell Purvis
Check out the paper at Controlling Information Systems Development Projects: The View from the Client
This article was originally published in Management Science, Vol 48, No. 4, April 2002.
[edit] Keywords
Control, IS project management, IS-Client relationship
