Identification of Critical Success Factors for Large Scale Information Systems Implementation in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Information is so crucial for the today’s business organizations existence. Most of them are moving towards the concept of digital firm or information centric business. Information therefore has become an important asset thus managing them in a proper way is considered as a high priority. Information systems (IS) have emerged to fulfill the need of them. Large businesses have very complex information requirements thus require complex IS namely “large scale IS”. During the last few decades many companies acquire large scale IS to gain competitive advantage. But the failure rate of enterprise systems as studied by the researchers were almost 70% and most of this IS failures resulted from poor implementation mechanisms adopted by the implementers. However, there has been not much research done to identify the factors that affect the implementation failures of large scale information systems in Sri Lanka. Therefore, it is worth studying and identifying the factors that affect the successful implementation of large scale IS in Sri Lanka. This paper focuses on developing and testing a model for successful large scale IS implementation by identifying critical success factors. A pilot survey was conducted initially to identify the critical factors for implementation success. For this, well reputed local and multinational companies’ top IT executives were surveyed. The analysis of gathered data reveals that the factors affecting the implementation of large scale IS can be distinctly categories in to six perspectives namely Individual, Task, Technology, Structure, Process & Environmental factors. Further analysis on data shows that these factors can again be overlook in two dimensions, factors affecting the pre-implementation stage and implementation stage. These six distinct categories were put in to four phases according to there priority of consideration. This research is only a beginning of a research effort that ultimately aimed to derive a framework for implementing large scale IS in business organizations in Sri Lanka.