"IT was a War that Wore out both Men and women..." - Metaphors in an Information System Project

This study looks at metaphors from the perspective of cognitive metaphor theory. Using the theory developed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) we examine the use of metaphors by project members in an information system (IS) project. The data was collected from 22 interviews. Interviews were conducted with a range of stakeholders, including representatives of users, software developers, experts and IT and service managers. The findings of this qualitative case study indicate that IS developers and experts use many kinds of metaphors to make sense of the IS project they work on. The findings also show that metaphor is pervasive in IS development work, not just in language but also in thought and action and various metaphors are used to make sense of the different phases of the project. It can be argued that the dominant metaphors of any given project will strongly affect the trajectory of the project. Thus the metaphors in use in a project should be a concern for project management and we suggest that emphasizing constructive metaphors could be beneficial for many projects.