Constructing IS success: revisiting actor networks in post implementation perspectives of enacting technological effectiveness within Commonwealth Games, Manchester 2002

Modern day organisation of major sporting events involving large number of participants, organisers and spectators invariably require a significant level of Information Systems (IS) support. Whilst planning and developing some of the IS infrastructure might be based upon past experiences yet implementing and ensuring a fit between expectations and experience of IS use is dependent on obtaining local conditions. The Commonwealth Games (CWG) held in Manchester in the year 2002 was no exception. It was successfully staged, bringing glory and honour to various actors involved at different levels of organisation. The primary objective of this paper is to explain success by deconstructing perspectives of key actors responsible for ICT infrastructure development and delivery within CWG 2002. Contrary to many public sector projects, successful IS/IT implementation at CWG was an imperative. In most similar situations, scope of evolutionary development is limited. This paper begins to analyse the evolution of success at the point where CWG had been successfully concluded. This paper argues that contrary to popular expectations of fixed goals and objectives, it was the evolutionary creation of solutions that were a serious contributor of eventual success of CWG. Using an Actor Network Theory (ANT) framework, this paper demonstrates the important role that perceptions of success tend to play within such large scale implementation of IS/IT. It is expected that organisers, scholars of IS success, public sector specialists and the like, would then be able to discern the role of alignments of actor networks for large organisational challenges like the CWG. Names of subjects have been changed to preserve anonymity.