Understanding the features of sociotechnical information system is one key for successful information system design and development.
Ethnography viewpoint has been formerly aimed to use in the information systems development by computer scientist, with no real understanding of the basics of ethnographic research (Forsythe 1999).
The attitude in information system development has been, as Forsythe (1999: 130), puts it: “Anyone can do ethnography – it’s just a matter of common sense.” She gives several1 reasons, why this really is a misconception, as ethnography requires real expertise. Still, in the everyday information system development projects the using of ethnography, and sociologists as experts, is not very common, at least not in middle-small scale projects. Heeks (2008:31) states: “We can extend the general finding that successful IT projects are led by hybrids that span the technical and organizational.” However, in the real world this kind of hybrid people, with expertise for engineering, ethnography, and economics are quite rare. This study aims at a solution which would help anyone to expand their hybrid viewpoint. The objective of this research is to create a methodology which should help to analyse the features of the computerised information system. The methodology would help ISD professionals understand the sociotechnical context of the information systems. This also includes understanding the
1 Many technical people see ethnography as something that either requires no particular expertise or for which their present expertise already equips them. To them, it’s “just a matter of common sense.” Actually, ethnography runs counter to common sense, since it requires one to identify and problematise things that insiders take for granted (and thus tend to overlook). It takes a good deal of training and experience to learn to do this. It may also take courage on occasion, since insiders tend to experience their own assumptions as obvious truths. The lone anthropologist in a technical or other field site may be the only one to question these truths (Forsythe 1999: 130)
differences between the developer’s and target organisation’s culture and context.
The basis for the approach to the organisational information system context in this research is to see it as an entity including people and technology. The idea of this research can be seen as being much in line with the definition given by Harvey and Myers (2002: 173) of traditional qualitative context research:
In the more traditional qualitative approaches, context is treated as the socially constructed reality of a named group, or groups, of social agents and the key task of observation and analysis is to unpack the webs of meaning transformed in the social process whereby reality is constructed
In this study the qualitative methodology is aimed to use as a way of approaching the empirical world as Taylor and Bodgan (1984: 5-6) define2 it.
A case study would have been an ideal approach to this research if there had been a suitable case to follow from the beginning of the information system development process, and also there should have been more than one case, in different types of organisations, and in different countries. This was not realistic for this research; it would have required far more resources than were available, such as a much longer time period for the whole research, the possibility of staying in several organisations, and permissions for the research. Only getting into an organization for research requires considerably work, as Taylor and Bodgan (1984: 19) remark:
The researcher must negotiate access, gradually win trust, and slowly collect data--- It is not uncommon for researchers to “spin their wheels” for weeks, even months trying to break into a setting.
2 1. Qualitative research is inductive, researchers develop concepts, insights, and understanding from patterns in the data.
2. In qualitative methodology the researcher looks at settings and people holistically.
3. Qualitative researchers are sensitive to their effects on the people they study.
4. Qualitative researchers try to understand people from their own frame of reference.
5. The qualitative researcher suspends, or sets aside, his or her own beliefs, perspectives, and predispositions.
6. For the qualitative researcher, all perspectives are valuable.
7. Qualitative methods are humanistic.
8. Qualitative researchers emphasize validity in their research.
Particularly when working in different counties, the access to the organisations would have been very difficult, if not practically impossible.
If this research were to be classified into some particular method, this would also seen as contextual research, as the aim is to get a deeper understanding of organisational information system, but in contextual research the aim is more concerned with organisational change, and it is usually focused on one particular organisation in order to get a deep understanding of the work inside the system (cf. Pettigrew 1985).
The aim of this research is to build a framework that will be usable in different information system contexts, not to explain the immediate context but detect it, aiming to define it as generic as possible. Thus the material has to be collected from many different kinds of organisations in Western and developing countries and their information system users on different levels, from the senior management to the field level, and deep concentration on individual cases in this phase is neither realistic nor practical. The verification of the analysis and the results of this research is close to impossible; for instance, there are no former results similar to these which we could use to compare our results to. Accordingly, in this research there is no aim to prove anything, only to construct something to be applied and evaluated and developed in further information system development projects by other organisational information system developers.
The starting point for the literature review on the concept of context was on the other sciences than information system research, such as anthropology, since they have deeper roots to context research..
Consequently, this research is interdisciplinary, exploiting material and theories from for instance sociology, anthropology, economics (especially organisation research) and pedagogy (education).
In this study Järvinen’s (2003: 104) advice about the construction of this framework is followed:
…when we select the constructs to include in our model. The choice of constructs dictates the things in the world to which our model applies...to solve the “how” problem we need some theoretical and/or empiricalconcepts andideas.
In this research, theworld is the organisation and the users of the IS. The concepts andideas for the literature review in this research were chosen
“opportunistically” from the areas as follows:
Organisation
x organisation theory, management theory
x organisational culture: this is also connected to the environmental/national culture
x organisational change: the change in working, for instance.
computerised ISs; ISD; Management of ISs (MIS)
x global organisations: conflicts between different environmental cultures within one organisation
Information system
x Management of Information System x Information System Development
Context
x social context in different fields of science (e.g. anthropology, education)
x organisational context
To attain the knowledge and understanding needed to continue towards a solution for the research problem, this researcher concentrated on these concepts, and searched for these in the literature.
This might be called an opportunistic literature review: at the beginning this researcher did not have any clear paths to gather information, only some key words, which guided the literature review;
the amount of different articles and other material altogether was enormous found with these words in different databases. However, the most of the material was irrelevant for this study, and picking out relevant material, concerning the idea of organizational information system context was an iterative process: as the research matured, and the understanding increased, the importance of the knowledge already gathered from the literature changed.