Lessons from the Failure and Subsequent Success of a Complex Healthcare Sector IT Project

TL;DR

This paper introduces Stakeholder Impact Analysis, a novel method grounded in social sciences, to identify socio-complexity risks in healthcare IT projects, demonstrated through a case study of the 1992 London Ambulance Service project.

Contribution

It presents a new approach to diagnosing IT project failures by focusing on socio-complexity and stakeholder interactions, expanding understanding of failure sources.

Findings

Stakeholder Impact Analysis can identify socio-complexity risks.

Applying the method could have mitigated the London Ambulance project failure.

The approach enhances failure analysis by considering social and organizational factors.

Abstract

This paper argues that IT failures diagnosed as errors at the technical or project management level are often mistakenly pointing to symptoms of failure rather than a project's underlying socio-complexity (complexity resulting from the interactions of people and groups) which is usually the actual source of failure. We propose a novel method, Stakeholder Impact Analysis, that can be used to identify risks associated with socio-complexity as it is grounded in insights from the social sciences, psychology and management science. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of Stakeholder Impact Analysis by using the 1992 London Ambulance Service Computer Aided Dispatch project as a case study, and shows that had our method been used to identify the risks and had they been mitigated, it would have reduced the risk of project failure. This paper's original contribution comprises expanding upon existing accounts of failure by examining failures at a level of granularity not seen elsewhere that enables the underlying socio-complexity sources of risk to be identified.