Expectations and Reality: Why an Enterprise Software System Did Not Work as Planned

Over two decades, we and other research groups have found that ethnographic and social analyses of work settings can provide insights useful to the process of system analysis and design. Despite this, ethnographic and social analyses have not been widely assimilated into industry practice. Practitioners tend to address sociotechnical factors in an ad-hoc manner, often post-implementation, once system use or outcome has become problematic. In response to this, we have developed a lightweight qualitative approach to provide insights to ameliorate problematic system deployments. Unlike typical ethnographies and social analyses of work activity that inform systems analysis and design; we argue that analysis of intentional and structural factors to inform system deployment and integration can have a shorter time duration and yet can provide actionable insights. We evaluate our approach using a case study of a problematic enterprise document management system within a multinational systems engineering organization. Our findings are of academic and practical significance as our approach demonstrates that structural-intentional analysis scales to enable the timely analysis of large-scale system deployments.