Metastructuration actions of management: critical for stakeholder intervention in IS/IT implementations

Metastructuration actions (overarching activities from management that shape and align users’ activities of IS/IT use) are often advocated to improve the success of IS/IT implementation. But how can management support enhance the success of IS/IT by metastructuration actions, when they are dealing with multiple stakeholders? This key question is addressed in this paper. Building on Orlikowski et al. (1995), we explore the contextual conditions of metastructuration actions of management concerning three other key stakeholders: users, the IT department, and external service providers or consultants. The empirical case context is a Dutch public healthcare organisation that deployed three (different) departmental information systems. Based on 26 interviews with all stakeholders that were involved in the deployment of the three departmental information systems, we find that three types of metastructuration actions were critical in a particular relationship with two types of stakeholders. We conclude that this demonstrates that stakeholder context is indeed conditional to metastructuration actions, and hence the success of an IS/IT implementation in terms of perceived system quality and acceptance.

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