Title:
Beyond
IT Interoperability Assessment: Complexity Analysis of The Project
Context
Abstract: IT people do best
what they are trained to do: examine interoperability issues through a
technical lens. It may be unfair to ask of them to systematically and
comprehensively analyze non-IT concerns of an interoperability project
such as business strategy, constraints and governance. Yet to fully
understand the feasibility of an interoperability project, IT people
need to examine non-IT factors that can make or break these complex,
expensive and time consuming projects. This paper is about a model that
emerged from a research project about understanding the nature of IT
projects. The Complexity-Based Project Classification Framework can be
used to assess the feasibility of a business interoperability
project. A three-round international Delphi project with a sample
of 23 acknowledged experts identified and prioritized the non-technical
project attributes that need to be analyzed when assessing IT project
feasibility. The Complexity-Based Project Classification Framework
emerged. The Complexity-Based Project Classification Framework is
composed of three parts: preconditions, contextual complexity
attributes and project effort attributes. Once preconditions are in
place (e.g. the organization needs to support using this model for
assessing the feasibility of business interoperability) then the
project team can assess the interoperability project by considering its
project effort attributes (e.g. technology) and project contextual
attributes (e.g. relative project size). It is suggested that
practitioners who use this Framework will have an improved
understanding of the IT interoperability project feasibility.
Author: Gregory
J. Skulmoski and Francis T. Hartman