The politics of information systems projects: Learning from the CIO

This paper attempts to study impact the impact of organizational politics on IT projects. In this paper we argue that the CIO is in a great position to understand the internal politics, and therefore can contribute significantly to not only the technical aspects of the project but also how politics needs to be tackled. This is particularly true when the CIO has been in the organization for some period of time. Finally, older and therefore more experienced CIOs can also bring their human management skills to bear on the project. Therefore a two way partnership between the external consultant and the CIO, where both contribute to the project, is the ideal way to approach such projects. Most researchers have concluded that these failures have been caused largely by human factors rather than any problems with the technology (Nath, 2016; Sridhar et. al., 2006; Dwivedi et. al., 2015; Rodríguez Montequín, et. al., 2016, Law and Ngai, 2007). Interestingly, one of the key human factors was found to be organizational politics (Nath, 2016; Dwivedi et. al., 2015; Leyh and Sander, 2015; Law and Ngai, 2007; Abelein and Paech, 2015). The CIO smiled. “Young man, take my advice and call them, ” was all he would say. And so, against his better judgement, the Consultant agreed to call the clerks. As expected, the officers understood the presentation, and were completely in sync, but the clerks were completely at sea. In fact they spent much of the time fiddling with their mobile phones, or simply looking bored. The Consultant began to feel smug. Each division has created its own processes over time. And none of them is willing to replace them with anything from another division. That is simply not acceptable. In very simple terms, it is an ego issue, and no divisional head can be seen to be bowing to any other division.”