Information Systems Success in the Public Sector: Stakeholders' Perspectives and Emerging Alignment Model

Introduction It is commonly accepted that Information Technology (IT) has become a tool with which to produce accurate, reliable and timely information through the development of Information Systems (IS). For an IS to be judged successful, however, it has to satisfy additional criteria in today's competitive world. For example, at a broad level, it is expected that it becomes a key component in achieving the organisation's mission (Drury & Farhoomand, 1998 referenced by Garson, 1999) and more narrowly, improve productivity and facilitate service delivery (Brown, 1999 cited by Garson, 1999). Even a cursory examination of the IS literature reveals that organisations have utilised numerous surrogate measures for IS success (see Hwang, Windsor, & Pryor, 2000). What is also evident is that IS Success studies have been conducted mostly in the private sector (Specht, 1999 cited by Garson, 1999) while research into IS success within the public sector has been greatly neglected (Seneviratne, 1999). Overall, it has been concluded that little progress has been made in how to achieve IS success within the public sector (Brown, 1999 cited by Garson, 1999). Yet IS are critical to increase effectiveness and efficiency in the delivery of public services, the management of critical information sources for decision making affecting the population, and formulation of public policy (Lynn, 1999 cited by Garson, 1999). The spectacular growth of public investment in IT further reflects an enormous potential for improving the performance of public organisations (Lynn 1998 cited by Garson, 1999). As such, understanding what contributes to IS success is of great importance and value to public sector agencies (Seneviratne, 1999). The objective of this study was to establish what IS success is within the Western Australian (WA) government sector. A stakeholder perspective was adopted since it was argued that success of an IS project is what stakeholders perceive it to be. To achieve this outcome, the views on how the public sector differs from the private sector were also captured. This would lead to an early model of IS success within the public sector in which key IS success variables would be aligned with public sector characteristics. In this way the study seeks to add to the current lack of research into IS success in the public sector thereby providing new insights to both the researcher and IS professional working in the sector. Background Literature When reviewing background literature, three key perspectives were encountered; they are outlined below and provided the basis for designing our research. The IS Success Model Perspective Much of the work done in IS success has its origin in the well-known DeLone and McLean (D&M) IS Success Model (DeLone & McLean, 1992). This model provided a comprehensive taxonomy on IS success based on the analysis of more then 180 studies on IS success and identified over 100 IS success measures during the analysis. It established that System Quality, Information Quality, Use, User Satisfaction, Individual and Organisational Impact were the most distinct elements of the IS success equation. In a later work, the authors confirmed the original taxonomy and their conclusion, namely that IS success was "a multidimensional and interdependent construct" (DeLone & McLean, 2003, p. 12). Seddon (1997) proposed a respecified and extended version of the original D&M IS Success model with the purpose of clarifying confusion caused by the integration of process and casual explanation of IS success measures. According to Seddon (1997), DeLone and McLean (1992) "tried to do too much in their model, and as a result, it is both confusing and misspecified" (p. 240). Seddon used literature on IS success to theoretically evaluate IS success measures and proposed the extended IS Success model. His model focused on measures of information and system quality and net benefits of IS use. …