Abstract

In the information systems literature the incidence of implementation failures has increasingly been attributed to excessive attention to technical and economic issues, and an absence of concern about the social, political, and psychological (individual) aspects of the system being developed. On an intuitive level this has been explained by assuming a techno-economic value orientation of the system developer This paper presents empirical evidence in support of the assumption of the dominance of technical and economic values in system developers. The basis of this evidence is a field study of developer values. These values were measured by adapting a value measurement methodology developed by England (1967). This methodology determines the behavioral relevance of values by classifying them from operative (most likely to govern behavior) to non-relevant (values having no impact on behavior). The study results show that technical and economic values are the most operative of system developer values. In the social, political, psychological domain, systemic values, and the values relating to the organization and functioning of the development project were found to be operative. However, the study found that the developers considered user job satisfaction related values mostly non-relevant.

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