=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1640/paper2
|storemode=property
|title=COProduction as Last Resort to Make IT Projects Less Doomed to Fail
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1640/paper2.pdf
|volume=Vol-1640
|authors=Federico Cabitza
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/avi/Cabitza14
}}
==COProduction as Last Resort to Make IT Projects Less Doomed to Fail==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1640/paper2.pdf
COProduction as last resort to make IT projects
less doomed to fail
Federico Cabitza
Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca,
Viale Sarca 335, 20135, Milano, Italy
Abstract. In this position paper, we make the point that the tenets of
the cultures of participation and co-production, if taken seriously, can
reform IT development in organizations for the better. Our idea is to
develop complex information systems in an integrated manner with the
participatory development of the social tools that could facilitate their
dissemination and their wide and satisfied adoption within an organiza-
tional setting, in particular a social media and wiki containing process
models as-is and to-be, ever refined requirements, change requests, bug
reports, incident reports, manuals, feedback surveys, and a communi-
cation platform to have designers, developers, clients, prospective end
users, and other stakeholders.
1 Introduction
The most recurring factors that have been retrospectively associated with the
complete or partial failure of IT projects are the lack of user involvement, bad
communication among the stakeholders (including end-users) and problems in
understanding and collecting user needs and requirements [6]. While the diagno-
sis of the problem has seemed clear for decades to date, it is still not clear how to
treat it and change the current state of affair. To this aim, several engineering-
oriented approaches have been proposed, some of which have been recently reno-
vated under the umbrella term “future-oriented technology analysis” [12], in the
same mould of FMECA and SWOT analyses. However, these latter techniques
have still to be consolidated in few and effective techniques and methodologies,
and these latter ones still be put to the test of life and their impact on IS success
evaluated. Moreover, chances are that merely technical approaches would likely
keep falling short of expectations, since many of the failure factors mentioned
above regard a socio-technical and cultural dimension.
The point of this position paper is that the concept of culture of participa-
tion must be introduced in the IT development discourse and even its farthest
consequences [3], like end-user empowerment and the progressive shift of re-
sponsibility from the professional designer to the customer be advocated and
promoted. For this to be possible beyond a merely over-simplistic claim, at least
two notions of the mainstream discourse must be addressed, deconstructed and
finally challenged.
7
Proc. of Second International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2014
Como (Italy), May 27th, 2014 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
Copyright © 2014 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes.
This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.
2 IT Projects and Projections
The first notion is the very core one of “project”, or better yet, the intrinsic
unbalance towards the ideal dimension of an IT artifact development project,
(i.e., its models and its design) at expense of the pragmatic dimension of the
process by which the artifact is “embedded” into a single social setting.
This abstracting and modelling phase regards a sort of Platonic fallacy, so
to say. Any project entails the projection of an idea (as well as the related ex-
pectations, hopes, resources) into the future (and hence the unknown): it is,
namely, the act of “throwing forth” (pro-ject) this idea through a trajectory
of interventions towards its objectivation and materialization. Important steps
in this trajectory regard the building of conceptual models: these latter regard
both the information structures that represent the reality of interest; the licit
transformations (rewritings) these structures can undertake; and the artifact’s
and persons’ behaviors that trigger, and are triggered by, these transformations.
Other steps regard the detailed and often formal specification of the models
mentioned above (indeed, their de-sign); and the development of the physical
components that build the whole new artifact up. However, it is a truism to
acknowledge that any stakeholder group has its own way to project things into
its future of concern and envision the related trajectory towards concrete real-
ization (e.g., the payment of the delivery for the producer, the effectiveness of
the delivered product for the payer). This is because this ultimately cognitive
process is strongly embedded in the common ground of a social community, its
ruling conventions and policies, and the principles and values underlying the
whole, that is the culture of that setting.
So far, relatively little emphasis in IS development (and many scholars would
rather Freudianly speak of IS design!) has been put on the last arc of the
project(ion) trajectory: the landing, so to say, which rather evocatively has been
assimilated to a clash, when we speak of impact and impact analysis; and on
what roles should deal with this delicate process of intertwined adoption and
adaptation of the new artifact into the flesh and bones of the setting it is sup-
posed to support. Very significantly, semiotics has been called in this process [5]:
it is more a matter of continuous communication (even delegated to the graphical
interface!), mutual understanding and reciprocal alignment between the design-
ers and the users, than a rational and balanced exchange between a demand and
an offer of economic nature that is regulated by a formal contract.
3 Participation and Particip-action
This leads us to the second concept we aim to challenge. This second notion
is that of “involvement”, as usually used in the phrases “user involvement”,
“stakeholder involvement”. To involve is a verb that entails the idea that someone
(the IT producer) is taking an active stance in making someone else (the user)
part of a “common” endeavor, and that this latter is involved, passively or with
little control of the process, as this is ultimately governed by the producer. This
8
Proc. of Second International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2014
Como (Italy), May 27th, 2014 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
Copyright © 2014 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes.
This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.
latter asks the users what he or she needs, is responsible to have elicited and
collected those needs accurately and completely, to have understood them and
translated into specific features of the artifact to be.
However, if requirement gathering is the frailest phase of the modern IS devel-
opment methodologies[15], chances are that this is due to the same perceptual
aberration that occurs in regard to the idea of “project”. An outside-the-box
way to solve this conundrum would be to address the construction of an IT ar-
tifact as a process of co-production [4], where both designers and users produce
something in it, and to propose as the main factor leading to the success of this
co-productive process the inception and promotion of a culture of participation
within the community that would host and embed the new artifact, as well be-
tween selected members of this community and of the professional community
of the IT vendor. We could call this approach one oriented to foster a Culture
Of participation for co-production, or COProduction for short.
4 COProducing Value in Computing
The idea of COProduction has a least two possible articulations. A weaker one:
IT specialists and prospective end-users (not so few of them, but two good ques-
tions could be “how many” and “who” to enroll to represent them taking into
consideration both the management and the shop floor) participate in several
opportunities of idea proposal, discussion and progressive formalization of these
ideas. This is, very shortly said, the main idea behind co-design and Partici-
patory Design [10, 16]. Computational means could play an important role in
this scenario: idea management systems, collective deliberation systems[9], and
ad-hoc qualitative techniques, like attitude surveys[2] and Exploratory Focus
Groups [11].
A stronger articulation: IT specialists build and configure the tools by which
users can easily build and configure (the symmetry is intended) their own struc-
tures (in the sense explained above), and they do it by assembling together
simpler constructs that partly address the main needs emerged during the in-
ception phase of the IT project. This is the main, and more ambitious idea of
the meta-design and End-User Development (EUD) [7].
The difficult thing of a COProduction approach is to have the courage to cut
with the past clearly and to apply it in a completely new mindset. Otherwise also
the most innovative articulation of it, i.e., meta-design, would risk to produce a
semiotic drift or misalignment (that is when something in the IT artifact means
something for a group of stakeholders and something else for another group)
between the building blocks conceived by the meta-designers according to the
indications of the involved end-users, and the structures assembled by the end-
users when they are left more in control of the development process later on. Or,
even more surreptitiously risky, that the unidirectional (and Platonic) idea of
project (i.e., the idea that some people, be they professional designers or end-user
designers can shape the Artifact on advance and on an essentially abstract and
theoretically stance, irrespective of its necessary post-adoption changes) infects
9
Proc. of Second International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2014
Como (Italy), May 27th, 2014 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
Copyright © 2014 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes.
This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.
also the EUD scenario, by replicating the same shortcomings, but with even less
awareness of the most common mistakes and blatant naiveties.
The only way to go beyond these two potential new modes of failure is to
embrace the COProduction idea seriously, and devise and test new methodolo-
gies that are aimed at developing both the artifact and the culture in which it
can be iteratively refined with the increasing participation of the end-users.
5 Tools for COProduction
Concretely, this means to conceive initiatives and interventions that are specif-
ically devoted to incept, foster, achieve, and maintain this kind of culture: for
instance, by planning events of co-design and focus groups, administering peri-
odic surveys to gather needs and wishes and collect feedback and perceptions,
setting up a lean social media aimed at helping all the interested users come to-
gether around the project (like a scaffolding [14]), and through which to solicit
and collect any kind of useful contribution for the development of the artifact-
related resources.
In particular, this social media could encompass a wiki manual or FAQ sec-
tion that is open for contribution to all of the employees of the hosting orga-
nization, a Forum where to discuss problems and share solutions, a Blog by
which to spread news and discuss the milestones achieved, a Requirement/Bug
Management System to provide continuous feedback, and the like. These inter-
ventions should also encompass the establishment (and precise characterization
in terms of tasks and skills) of roles that would be made accountable for the
success of these distributed and collective initiatives, like the gardener [13] or
the maieuta-designer described in [1].
6 Conclusions
Although to build such a socio-technical scaffolding around a new IT artifact
can be costly and require an additional effort, the costs of failure in IT projects
can be much higher, as experience shows [6] and ask for alternative solutions.
Future research must grow strong enough to give the potential entailed by the
COProduction tenets to those organizations that want to reach success faster
and be able to host (that is en-able) cycles of joint co-evolution (of the tasks,
the people, the tools [8]) to cope with the never-ending change of the context
around them and their needs.
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Proc. of Second International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2014
Como (Italy), May 27th, 2014 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
Copyright © 2014 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes.
This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.