Identifying and Explaining Risk Factors Associated with

Many information systems projects are classified as failures because time/budget overruns or they do not meet user's expectations. In this paper we examine the influence of culture on the propensity for these factors to occur in a software development context. This study seeks to investigate the environmental dynamics within IS projects in Thailand, a country whose development lags that of western economies and whose cultural characteristics differ significantly from western nations. First we review the literature on risk factors in IS projects and discuss the eleven risk factors that Schmidt et al. identified as being important in multiple cultural settings. We then present a cultural analysis of Thailand and discuss the effect of cultural, socioeconomic and technological factors on eleven risk factors in Thai IS projects. We conclude with a set of propositions that suggest that the risk of project failure is generally greater in Thailand than in western nations.