System Implementation Success Factors; It’s not just the Technology

System implementation efforts offer extraordinary challenges to information technology professionals and the organizations impacted by the implementations. A successful implementation can reap vast rewards in organizational strengths and efficiencies. A failure can drain an organization of people, funds and vitality. Consequently, many people have puzzled over the reasons for the successes and failures experienced with these implementations. This paper examines these puzzlings as offered through scholarly research and first-hand reports of system implementations within institutions of higher education and discovers that many answers lie outside the bounds of technology.