Data Collection

A cross-sectional study will be conducted in this research. Around four months of time was taken to execute the semi-structured interviews. Evidently, the semi-structured interviews are the main data collection method used in this research to gain more understanding of the phenomenon in hand. Interview will also help in uncover the relationship of the emerged themes; especially, in the open sampling stage by discovering open codes and their properties and dimensions. Not only will the semi-structured facilitate in variation sampling by finding main themes and the relationship between them but also will contribute in determining the validated selected core categories in the discriminated sampling phase (Creswell, 2012). Though the researcher believed that focus group could have enriched the research; however, it was extremely difficult to reach participants with high rank in the organisation as well as other companies, for that reason the research opted that the interview should be enough to cover the phenomenon with the required depth; precisely, knowing those participants have high skill and rich knowledge about the subject gathered from years of experience in many companies related to the aerospace sector.

Having a clear insight about the phenomenon in hand would not be possible without having accessibility to those who are making decisions and those who are managing the phenomenon. Indeed, the executive and director of the

companies’ interviews enriched the study and deemed essential for such researches. It was only due to the fact that researcher’s influential network made such research exist due to his previous work in the airline. Accessibility to executives is usually difficult as they lack the interest to avail time to researchers, not to mention an hour or maybe more for this research. Many times interviews were cancelled before few hours and sometimes minutes, and this was understandable by researcher owing to how hectic their schedule while deploying and post implementation of the MES. Incessant follows up with executive offices by emails and phone calls make it possible to engage the participant. This took a lot of time and efforts from the researcher.

The time will be invested in setting up these interviews especially because of the participant ranking, the difficulty to approach them on top of their busy schedule and the diverse locations for other partners. In order to have well-designed questions,a cognitive interview is to be carried out with a small sample just to make sure those questions asked reveal the same meaning at the recipient side. Likewise, pilot semi-structured interviews would be considered as trial interviews for the next round of interviews to be performed in the case study that will act as training for the author. Yet, the main purpose is to stress on the main themes and to construct questions around them for the semi-structured interview as it will also act as confidence valve of assuring the validity of questions.

The below table 3.1 indicates companies and interviewees.

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Company Title No. Of

Participants

Airline IT/Business Manager

General Manager EVP IT

8 5 1

Sabre Product Manager

Regional Manager

2 1

SAP Product Manager 2

Amadeus Product Manager 1

Tata Consultancy Service Product Manager 2

KPMG PMO Director 2

WIPRO Product Manager 2

Table ‎3.1 List of Interviewees

3.5.1 Semi-Structured Interviews

The researcher has formulated the interview questions over many stages. First stage was the initial primary questions developed by the researcher. There were many stages where these questions evolved as the researcher trying to capture the phenomenon by reading relevant literature and asking experts in the fields. A pilot study has been conducted by the researcher to have an in-depth view of the phenomenon besides including experts view about the interview questions (Creswell, 2012). This study has brought concepts to

research and aligned the research in a proper path for acquiring the knowledge about the phenomenon under the study.

Moreover, the pilot field interviews helped in constructing and formulating questions. These interviews are specifically designed to help in providing a deeper view on the subject and fine-tune the tentative conceptual framework.

Once the pilot interviews are coded and analysed another visit to the tentative conceptual work is required to shape it or optimise it. Alternatively, conducting a survey to tackle some of the themes to emphasise their validity and enhance their reliability part would be a viable option. After that, a semi-structured interview has been conducted in the selected case study aiming for a deep understanding of the complex processes implied in the subject research, especially when involving several layers from the company such as senior management from business and IT, and supervision layer.

Semi-structured interview intended to explore the phenomenon of Multi-collaborative Enterprise System by interviewing those who had been in the experience itself. Though the researcher started with a tentative model in mind, but after the simultaneous analysis process this model start to change. From an interview to another, the researcher would incorporate the findings of previous ones and include in the next interview to confirm the findings. Hence, these interviews are accounted for theoretical sampling stages comprising open, variation, and discriminate sampling.

Table 3.3 includes a summary of all categories of participant. The author was keen to include the participants who have an influential role in the initiative of MES. This includes most of the executive and senior management of the

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undertaking. Knowing that some of the vendors are competitors to each other in the market, the researcher was keen to include all of these companies as each one has a different opinion and view of the phenomenon. These companies include world class vendor in their fields such as, SAP, Amadeus, Tata Consultancy Service, KPMG, and WIPRO. There was a bid for each track of business and request for proposal was provided to many companies and those ones were short listed to ones that the researcher has interviewed.

The interview time varies from participant to another depending on different aspects like slot availability, role in the undertaking, and personality. Some tend to be succinct, and others are more elaborative. The longest one took two hours, and a half and shortest one was only about forty five minutes. It took a lot of efforts to arrange these interviews mostly for availability of the participants and also their rank in the organisation. Almost all the participants are categorised as IT professionals, reference to their education level and years of experience in the airline and IT fields.

All of the interviews have been transcribed fully to reflect the experience of all participants who participated in this study. The interviews were not the only source of information researcher relied on; some of side talks with IT professional whether inside the airline or their partners in this initiative. These informal conversations helped understanding the overall picture of MES, and the researcher was able to discuss further concepts that could help the research such as deciding on who are most contributors to MES that should be.