Discourses of Implementing Information Systems in Corporate Merger: A Case Study from the Food Exporting Industry

In 2007 five different industrial food producers merged to become one single firm. This paper places focus on the challenge these actors had in deciding on, implementing, and using an information system to support mainly their raw material purchasing and finished product sales function. Studies show that a large part of information system implementation failures are related to insufficient alignment between various aspects or parts of an organization and the new technology (Miller 2001, Wognum 2004). A report of a working group from The Royal Academy of Engineering and The British Computer Society concerning the challenges of complex IT project (RAEng, 2004) supports this view stating that the most pressing problems are related to the human aspect of processes involved in these kinds of projects, and that further developments in methods and tools to support the design and delivery of such projects could help to raise success rates. Among key findings of this study were: • The levels of professionalism observed in software engineering are generally lower than those in other branches of engineering, although there are exceptions • Senior managers are often ill qualified to handle issues relating to complex IT projects • The importance of project management is not well understood and usually underrated • The vital role of the systems architects in major IT projects is frequently not appreciated and there is a shortage of appropriately skilled individuals • Basic research into complexity and associated issues is required to enable the effective development of complex, globally distributed systems