Information systems development project as action research: Changing a school

Information System Development Projects are usually carried out using the strategy of divide and conquer, in that way the project is split into two realms, the technical one and the organizational one. This separation institute a division of labor between those people who built the system and those who use it. The literature in both areas, technical and organizational uses this approach either implicitly or explicitly. There have been cases in which this approach leads to success, but there were also plenty of cases in which failures occurred, and the literature point to a culprit which can be called the interface between the technical and the organizational part. According to DeMarco and Lister (1987), "For the overwhelming majority pf the bankrupt projects we studied, there was not a single technological issue to explain the failure. The first objective is to study the organizational learning taking place during the lifecycle of an Information System Development project. The second objective is to make an inquire about the separation between the technical and organizational part of an Information System Development Project, and then find out what is happening in the technical development and in the organizational development. The Third objective is to find out how is the process of the Information System development when the technical and the organizational development are concurrently implemented during the life cycle of the project.