AN INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS FAILURE; What really constitutes IS failure\ulcorner

Information systems (IS) failures still continue and are prevalent everywhere. When considering an enormous amount of budget currently invested on IS technology in many organizations, these continuing failures can be critical culprits to failures of the organizations themselves. However, the meaning and definition of IS failures are not unified among IS researchers as well as IS practitioners although there have been a lot of conceptual research regarding the concept of IS failures. Previous empirical studies are not enough yet and thus we anticipate further empirical studies to be performed which will validate previous conceptual research. In this regards, by analyzing IS practitioners perception toward IS failures in a more detailed manner, this research extends conceptual and empirical research in the past which previously identified the structure of information systems (IS) failures. Further, this current study identified the interrelationships among the categories. The data was analyzed using a multidimensional scaling program and fourteen categories of problems were identified as to constitute the IS failure structure. It was found that about a half of categories identified were related to technical failures such as network and system infrastructure, costs, data/information, and program errors. The other remaining categories were related with organizational or social problems such as business success, human resources, relationships, communication, and user skills.