Ict Architecture and Project Risk in Inter-Organizational Settings

This paper investigates the relationship between ICT architectures and project risk, in the context of the development of large inter-organizational systems. Although previous research has identified ICT architecture as a project risk, the focus has been on technical issues. Expanding this perspective, we investigate how technical architectures have bearings on the organization of projects, which may, to a large extent, determine the outcome of large information infrastructure initiatives. Our empirical evidence is ten cases from the health sector, collected over a period of 20 years. Due to space limitations only two cases are presented in this paper. A multi-level analysis allowed us to identify two main architectures; the institutional interface architecture (INA) and the service provider architecture (SPA). Through the careful study of ten cases over a period of 20 years, we present evidence for the high project risk of the INA and the viability of the SPA strategy. We find that the SPA has significant impact not only on the complexity of the technological solutions, but – more importantly – also on the complexity of the projects developing the solutions. The organizational complexity of the SPA based projects, and hence the necessary co-ordination activities, were dramatically reduced, and the success rate of the projects and the benefits for the users similarly increased.