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The continuity of underperforming ICT projects in the public sector

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journal contribution
posted on 2015-03-24, 11:49 authored by M.S. Sandeep, M.N. Ravishankar
There is a growing body of research on the successes and failures of information and communications technology (ICT) projects in the public sector. However, this literature has rarely addressed the question of why some projects persist and continue despite functioning poorly in several areas. In this paper, we suggest that the notions of institutional logics and status differences provide useful insights into the structure and trajectory of this type of continuity. We build our arguments through an in-depth qualitative case study of a public information and communications technology (PICT) project in India. From our findings, we develop a process model of PICT project continuity. We explain how the employment of bureaucratic posturing – a manifestation of bureaucratic logic – as a tactic by high status groups could lead to poor performance on several fronts. The paper elaborates on two levels of continuity: policy-level continuity, which in our case was enabled by the logics of decentralization and technocracy, and operational-level continuity, which was achieved when groups with contrasting status-related motivations supported the project.

History

School

  • Business and Economics

Department

  • Business

Published in

INFORMATION & MANAGEMENT

Volume

51

Issue

6

Pages

700 - 711 (12)

Citation

SANDEEP, M.S. and RAVISHANKAR, M.N., 2014. The continuity of underperforming ICT projects in the public sector. Information and Management, 51 (6), pp. 700 - 711.

Publisher

© Elsevier

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2014

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Information and Management and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2014.06.002

ISSN

0378-7206

Language

  • en