A participatory approach to the inclusion of indigenous Australians in information technology

Though information technology (IT) transformation programs are gaining in importance, we know little about the nature of the challenges involved in such programs and how to manage them. Using grounded theory methodology, we conducted a multiyear case study of a large IT transformation program in a major commercial bank, during which we encountered the interrelated themes of paradoxes and ambidexterity. Grounded in our case, we construct a substantive theory of ambidexterity in IT transformation programs that identifies and explains the paradoxes that managers need to resolve in IT transformation programs. The ambidexterity areas we identified are (1) IT portfolio decisions (i.e., IT efficiency versus IT innovation), (2) IT platform design (i.e., IT standardization versus IT differentiation), (3) IT architecture change (i.e., IT integration versus IT replacement), (4) IT program planning (i.e., IT program agility versus IT project stability), (5) IT program governance (i.e., IT program control versus IT project autonomy), and (6) IT program delivery (i.e., IT program coordination versus IT project isolation). What weaves these six areas together is the combined need for IT managers to employ ambidextrous resolution strategies to ensure short-term IT contributions and continuous progress of IT projects while simultaneously working toward IT transformation program success as a foundation for IT-enabled business transformation. However, in addition to this commonality, we find that the nature of paradoxical tensions differs across the six areas and requires slightly different management strategies for paradox resolution. Ambidexterity areas (1), (2), and (3) are associated with IT transformation strategizing and, in addition to balancing short- and long-term goals, require the mutual accommodation and blending of business and IT interests in the spirit of IT-business partnering to achieve IT-enabled business change and IT-based competitiveness. Ambidexterity areas (4), (5), and (6) are associated with IT program and project execution and, in addition to balancing short- and long-term requirements, require a recurrent and dynamic act of balancing “local” needs at the IT project level and “global” needs at the IT program level.

Due to the high turnover of teaching staff in remote schools, the long-term sustainability of educational initiatives that enhance Indigenous student's learning is a major concern. This article presents a study of a remote Indigenous school (Ischool) situated in Queensland. Ischool has changed its approach to leadership, particularly the distribution of power and authority within the school context, to address this concern. The focus is on building the capacity of Indigenous staff. It is a holistic and communal approach that is culturally inclusive of Indigenous ways of being and operating. The approach actively ensures that power and authority, and roles and responsibilities, are shared between Indigenous and non-Indigenous staff. Data were collected in one-on-one interviews with Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants involved in the change process. A grounded methodological approach was utilised using open coding to break down data into distinct units of meaning. The results reveal that the Indigenous community of Ischool were more committed to promoting and sustaining education initiatives that improve student learning when: (a) school leadership structures were inclusive of Indigenous voices and Indigenous ways of relating; (b) power and authority within the school context was shared, and (c) Indigenous staff were included in professional development opportunities that foster collaborative classroom partnerships and legitimise their own knowledge of their culture and community.

The presence and development of competency in IT programs

Information technology project outcomes: user participation structures and the impact of organization behavior and human resource management issues

An Adaptive and Preemptive Theory for Improving Systemic IT Project Failure Trends (“AdaPIT” Theory)

Accurate Assessment of Kidney Function in Indigenous Australians: The Estimated GFR Study

From January 12-24, 2004 the Faculty of Information Technology, at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), conducted the first Pre-IT program for indigenous students in Australia. The program was run successfully for a second time in July 2005, with a another planned for 2006. The Pre-IT grew out of the Indigenous Participation in Information Technology (IPIT) Project which began at UTS in 2002. The purpose of the IPIT Project is to increase the participation of indigenous Australians in IT studies and careers (Robertson, Dyson, Norman, & Buckley, 2002).

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to adapt a causal modelling approach to investigate the organisational collaboration and information technology (IT) project management issues concerning the planning and adoption of inter‐organisational IT systems across NHS hospital pathology departments.Design/methodology/approachThe researchers adopted an interpretive research approach utilising qualitative methods and in particular template analysis. Themes and categories were initially derived from a review of the literature based on critical success factors from enterprise resource planning (ERP) projects.FindingsA causal loop modelling approach was adapted to define key linkages between success factors. This highlighted virtuous and vicious cycles associated with IT project management and team collaboration – influencing the adoption process of large‐scale integrated IT systems.Research limitations/implicationsSingle case studies can be problematic in terms of generalising from the research. The study had a limited number of interview participants due to the focus on strategic management. Future studies could extend the number of stakeholders involved and also focus on end‐users of services, such as clinicians in primary care.Practical implicationsThe discussion and conclusions assess the appropriateness and utility of using a causal modelling approach, and an adapted causal loop model, to inform more effective approaches to IT planning, project management, team collaboration and adoption of integrated systems.Social implicationsThe findings indicate that a more enhanced understanding of project team collaboration involving technical, administrative and clinical stakeholders has the potential to inform more effective strategies for modernisation of hospital clinical services such as pathology.Originality/valueThis study investigates the anatomy of a high‐profile IT project under the umbrella of strategic modernisation of health services. Privileged access to key stakeholders has enabled the development of a causal model for IT project collaboration and management. This will form the basis for further development of more refined models to enhance project outcomes in the future.

: The federal government spends billions of dollars on information technology (IT) projects each year. Despite spending billions on IT, the government has achieved little of the productivity improvements that private industry has realized from IT. Too often, federal IT projects run over budget, behind schedule, or fail to deliver promised functionality. The March 2009 Defense Science Board concluded that three root causes emerged from a review of major IT acquisition programs where cost, schedule, and performance were issues. First, senior leaders lacked experience and understanding. Second, the program executive officers and program managers had inadequate experience. Third, the acquisition process was bureaucratic and cumbersome, where many who were not accountable had to say yes before authority to proceed. To address these concerns, the U.S. Chief Information Officer, the Office of Personnel Management, and the Office of Management and Budget launched an initiative to strengthen program management by designing a formal IT Program Management career path. This research analyzes the need for IT Program Managers (PM) within the federal government by comparing the differences between IT PMs and non-IT PMs.

Compared with other projects, information technology (IT) projects are unique, which are characterized by emergency, uniqueness, one shot, short term and uncertainty. To implement an IT project successfully, problems in the IT project management must be found, analyzed and solved and there must be successful project management and management innovation as well. Then, what are the major problems in IT project management? Who can conduct IT project management successfully? How to conduct IT project management successfully? How to innovate IT project management? This paper discusses all these questions. And on the basis of the above, it also draws the following conclusion: The project managers play a key role in both implementing and controlling stages of IT projects. The project managers should regard IT project management as a system, deal with various relationships with the parties concerned in the system well, and conduct management innovation. By adequate communication channels, the project managers should communicate with all the stakeholders, i.e. the factors in the system, including the client, the management, and the team members to know their requirements, needs and the problems respectively. Only by so doing, can they give satisfactory responsiveness to the client, get support from the management, lead and control the team outstandingly, and make the team work efficiently. While by management innovation, the project managers can make all the factors in their management system interact effectively and efficiently with each other to create a synergy effect. Only by so doing, can the IT project management be successful, and finally, can the IT projects be implemented successfully.

Information technology (IT) projects are often viewed as arenas in which action is paramount, and tasks, budgets, people, and schedules need to be managed and controlled to achieve expected results. This perspective is useful because it encourages the project manager to scope work, manage time and budget, and monitor progress. Another perspective views a project as a place where learning and knowledge is paramount. In this view, projects are seen as a conduit for knowledge, which enters through people, methodologies, and prior learning. During the project, knowledge must be transferred, integrated, created, and exploited to create new organizational value. Knowledge is created, and knowledge can be lost. Within an IT project, this focus on knowledge yields new insights, because IT projects are primarily knowledge work. From this perspective, the project manager's primary task is to combine multiple sources of knowledge about technologies and business processes to create organizational value. These and other views of the IT project are complementary. However, this article focuses only on the knowledge perspective, leaving aside other views. This article is designed to bring together the empirical literature, which has investigated the impact of knowledge perspectives on IT project performance, and to suggest a temporal model of this perspective. In the first part of this article, we consider the knowledge-based view of an IT project and suggest definitions and a typology of knowledge. Then the knowledge risks model (Reich, 200?) is used as a framework within which to collect and examine the empirical data that support the knowledge-based view of an IT project. In the third part of this article, the problem of modeling knowledge and learning within IT projects is addressed. The study begins with the Temporal Model of IT Project Performance (Gemino, Reich, & Sauer, 2008) and discusses evidence that its knowledge-based constructs and subconstructs are influential with respect to project performance. The article ends by proposing a temporal model of the knowledge perspective of an IT project. There are five constructs in this model: knowledge resources, knowledge creation, knowledge loss, project performance, and learning. The content of these constructs and their expected interaction is discussed. Although this stream of work is at its early stages, hopefully it will convince researchers that further investigation into knowledge and learning within projects is warranted because it has the potential to impact both the theory and performance of IT projects.

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to examine the influence of stakeholder integration and project complexity on information technology (IT) projects in Kenya. The following research question guided our inquiry: what is the influence of project complexity and stakeholder integration on the performance of IT projects in Kenya?Design/methodology/approachTo advance the current understanding of the effect of stakeholder integration and project complexity on IT projects, multiple regressions were used to predict how project complexity and stakeholder integration influence project performance. Both government-funded and privately funded IT projects from a developing country were examined.FindingsThe study found that any project’s complexity and stakeholder integration levels offer a distinctive contribution to its success. Theoretically, the study contributes to linkages between stakeholder integration and project complexity concerning IT project performance. Through the adoption of actionable research and theoretical elaboration, we have shown that the successful execution of IT projects is driven by the successful integration of stakeholders and monitoring the level of complexity at each phase of the project.Originality/valueThe findings of this study add to the burgeoning literature on the performance of IT projects and come with several managerial implications as well. It brings to the fore the concept of stakeholder integration as an essential element of project success. The findings suggest that the inclusion of stakeholder integration into corporate decisions, strategies and policies can be an asset to the production of sustainable competitive advantages needed during the implementation of IT projects in government entities and organisations. As shown in this study, all the above require a collaborative platform allowing for data sharing among diverse stakeholders to ameliorate distrust or lack of information.

The success rate of information technology (IT) projects is still low. Based on one survey done in 1990s, only about 10% of software development project could be finished according to its planned budget and schedule. Another study in 1995 found that only 16.2% IT project succeed, and at the same time more than 31% IT projects were cancelled before finished. It has been found a lot of IT projects had been implemented with swelling budget. Although it is still debatable, one of the reasons of IT project implementation failure is because risk management in some IT projects is not implemented by the IT providers. The objectives of this research are to get knowledge and assess risks in implementing IT projects. This research also gives recommendations in mitigating IT project risks. In two projects that were used as sample of this research, it has been found some risks that could be happened in IT projects. That risks were then assessed based on the probability and its impact, and finally produced the recommendation for risk mitigation. All risks are described in the Risk Priority, moreover risk probability and impact is described in the probability-impact matrix from all of 4 levels. This research could improve the awareness of IT providers in Indonesia about the important of implementing IT risk management so that more IT projects in Indonesia could be run successfully.Keywords: Risk assessment, information technology project, impact, frequency

Many information technology (IT) projects in the U.S. federal government have been plagued with failures and overruns in recent years, wasting a large amount of tax revenues and undermining the public’s confidence in the government’s ability to manage such resources and deliver on its commitments. What affects the performance of IT projects in the federal government? We find that prior literature on IT project management from the private sector setting is inadequate to answer this question. In addition, to the best of our knowledge, information systems (IS) research thus far has not considered how the decision-making authority of an IT unit influences IT project performance at the organizational level. We leverage several unique characteristics of the public sector, vis-à-vis for-profit firms, in developing our theory and hypothesis. Utilizing official datasets on IT projects and human resource records, we find that the more IT managerial officials and supervisors a federal bureau has, the lower time overruns it experiences in its IT projects. Interestingly, this relationship is weakened when the bureau has a larger number of ongoing IT projects. Our findings offer new theoretical insights for the IT project management literature and provide meaningful policy insights into government IT management.

Current demands for graduates of Information Technology (IT) programs require that they possess deep technical skills, multidisciplinary awareness, and the ability to deliver the value of technical skills to customers and clients. In order to produce this kind of IT professional, secondary and post-secondary educational institutions must embrace this vision. Supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF DUE 0202482), the Virginia Community College System (VCCS) Institute of Excellence for Information Technology (IE-IT) is spearheading the realization of this vision in an Advanced Technological Education (ATE) project titled: Creating Pathways for New IT Professionals. The project is piloting the creation of a Consortium for IT Education in Virginia in order to upgrade and align IT curricula, to provide clear, well-defined pathways in IT education from grades 9 - 16, to incorporate value-delivery skills into secondary and post-secondary IT curricula, to institute updated articulation agreements in IT among secondary and post-secondary educational institutions, and to provide professional development training to secondary and post-secondary IT instructors. This work is incorporating advice and input from the IT industry, from existing pilot projects, and from the work of other ATE projects. The project is impacting the IT programs, faculty, and students in secondary schools as well as two- and four-year colleges in Virginia through the project's statewide Consortium for IT Education, through support for online communications and collaboration, and through professional development training and workshops. Students graduating from IT education programs with curricula that are better aligned with those of higher levels of IT education and that have better, regularly updated dual enrollment and articulation agreements will benefit academically because more of them will be admitted to four-year programs. Moreover, advancing and upgrading IT education programs statewide will benefit the careers of their students making them better prepared to join the IT workforce upon graduation.