The NHS National Programme for IT in England was launched in 2002 as the largest IT investment in the UK health care services. Mitchell, Agle & Wood (1997) suggests that three key players – governance agencies, top management in professional groups and customers, patients and potential patients, in this case – are positioned centrally to criticise or appraise the programme because of the importance of their stakeholder status. Mitchell, Agle & Wood (1997) assert that three unique attributes – power, legitimacy and urgency – are important to identify a stakeholder’s salience to a project. The purpose of this initial pilot research is to explore the views from the middle management in the professional groups as their opinions are not usually directly exposed to the government or the general public with regard to issues surrounding the implementing of such programmes.
A grounded approached was used to emerge views at a single early adopter site, a London Hospital. The initial findings of this research are that while middle managers subscribe to the same philosophy as the top management, they hold a key stakeholder role during the dynamic power shifts of the project’s progress. The dynamism of stakeholder’s status changes can be explained in terms of power, legitimacy and urgency and these may hold the key to understanding some of the problems associated with attempts to deploy very large IT based socio-technical visions.
When Dr. David W Wilson joined the second cohort of the ISAD (later ADMIS) Programme in the Information Systems Department at the LSE he was between a post in the Civil Service Department with responsibility, inter alia, for maintaining the Data Dictionary on the Personnel Record Information System for Management (PRISM), a pioneering inverted file database project in two five year phases and responsibility for defining processes advisory to consignment landing officers in HM Custom & Excise’s Departmental Entry Processing System (DEPS) the replacement for the London Airport Cargo EDP System (LACES) the world’s first Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) project. Finding difficulty in convincing home civil service developers of the importance of Socio-technical approaches, David made a career change and took a position for 15 years as a Lecturer and later Senior Lecturer at Hong Kong Polytechnic, mostly delivering holistic Information Systems methodologies and pragmatic programming languages suitable for transaction processing systems.
Returning to the UK he completed his Doctoral Thesis, a promulgation of an hybrid Maturity Model positioned between those of the Software Engineering community and those of the Information Management Community, at Warwick Business School and took up a Lecturing position at Birkbeck College. During this period of 15 years he managed the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems’ largest undergraduate programme and latterly envisioned, developed and launched the Department’s second largest Masters Programme, the MSc in Information Systems & Management, which he currently recruits and directs. His supervised research with Senior IS practitioners has emerged an explanation for the lack of agility of Japanese banks to leverage global telecommunication systems and an heterarchical perspective of global outsourcing.
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