5. Expectations and Reality: Why an Enterprise Software System Did Not Work as Planned

Over two decades, we and other research groups have found that ethnographic and social analyses of work settings can provide insights useful to the process of systems analysis and design. Despite this, ethnographic and social analyses have not been widely assimilated into industrial practice. Practitioners still address sociotechnical factors in an ad hoc manner often after having observed that a system has become problematic during implementation. In response to this we have developed a lightweight qualitative approach to provide insights to ameliorate problematic implementations. We demonstrate that the analysis of intentional and structural factors to inform system deployment and adoption can provide actionable insights in a short period of time in a manner that is compatible with the ad hoc approach of industry. We evaluate our approach using a case study of a problematic enterprise document management system within a multinational systems engineering organisation. Our findings are of significance as we demonstrate an approach that informs a different phase of information systems development to typical social analyses and in doing so appears to provide a better fit with industrial practice.