The Dynamics of International Information Systems: Anatomy of a Grounded Theory Investigation

The serious difficulties facing the developer of international information systems (i.e. supporting business functions in different countries) are widely known and their propensity to catastrophic failure has been acknowledged among practitioners for quite some time. Despite the often pivotal importance that such systems generally have scholarly research in this field has been surprisingly sparse. Information technology applications with a global range and reach are still largely unstudied and under-explored. Subsequently there is a distinct dearth of theoretical frameworks for dealing with them. After a career in information technology line management I have been involved with multinational enterprises and their information systems for over a decade as a consultant, working in Africa, the UK, continental Europe, North America and Australasia. It was on joining a university in the early nineties that I discovered the near-vacuum in this field of research. When I decided to make international information systems my field of research it became clear that fairly fundamental work needed to be done. I started the project described further on more than 10 years ago. It turned out a fairly difficult, necessarily broad based and, eventually, longitudinal research.