Stimulating power games as a part of systems development

Abstract

The biggest problems of information system development (ISD) are not in the construction of technical artefacts. The real challenges to development are the social and political aspects of change. Imagining new organizational structures is difficult because knowledge about existing structures is often objectified. Furthermore, the power structures of organizations make such imagination more difficult or even forbidden. This paper describes a study in which a prototype of an information systems (IS) development method, called the Labour Game, was evaluated in field experiments. The paper describes the method and demonstrates how it succeeded in shifting the focus of discussions from technical development to issues which typically increased the competence of employees and modified the power structures of the work processes. The paper advocates the use of ‘soft’ methods, which help users and managers to talk about the social structures of work and consequently about different IS requirements in the early phases of systems development.