Longitudinal case study method

In total, the timeline during which the research was conducted covered approximately two years, from July 2008 to April 2010, and was spread over four fieldwork visits. The

gap between each fieldwork visit was six months, with a maximum of a two-week visit each time. As mentioned in the interview subject and related to the table below (Table 9), the number of users in the table includes the head of finance and other finance users. In total, sixty interviews were conducted with each interview lasting between forty-five minutes to an hour. Please refer to Appendix 2 for detailed interview respondents by dates.

Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4 Total Date 07/2008 02/2009 09/2009 04/2010 User Case 1 4 2 5 5 16 User Case 2 3 3 0 0 6 User Case 3 3 5 3 3 14 Vendor 1 11 2 3 17 Project Manager 0 2 0 1 3 ITD Case 1 1 2 0 0 3 ITD Case 2 1 0 0 0 1 ITD Case 3 0 0 0 0 0 Total 13 25 10 12 60

Table 9: Number of interview respondents, by case, by phase and by stakeholder

4.5.3.1 Phase 1 (the pilot study)

It is a requirement of the research training programme to complete a pilot study. The initial selection for the case studies was to include all universities that currently implement an enterprise system which refers to an integrated system for finance. Following some brief research on the matter, it was observed that four universities in the vicinity of the researcher‟s hometown were either currently implementing, or in the process of developing, such systems.

An e-mail was sent to the head of finance of four universities asking for permission to gain access to the university. Direct contact with the head of finance was established mainly due to the researcher‟s prior engagement with the university. Access was granted and interviews for the pilot study were conducted with the four universities. The mode of questioning during the interview was mostly exploratory and retrospective. Only general questions were asked, with the researcher probing interesting issues

further to gather a more in-depth understanding. The interviewees‟ responses usually required further elaboration with respect to particular historical events deemed pertinent for the research.

Initial analysis of the pilot data shows that three of the universities were currently developing or implementing the same integrated finance systems by the same vendor. In view of this interesting finding, it was decided that these three universities would be chosen for the study. The findings from the pilot study also changed the initial dimension or the domain of the research. While the initial research proposal intended to study the effect of enterprise systems implementation on management control, this was later changed to the current objectives, namely to understand the process of enterprise system development in universities in Malaysia.

In this research, the access obtained from a single respondent (the head of finance) grew into multiple respondents, following their recommendation and responses during the interviews. This follows the notion of following the actor as suggested by Latour (1987). The application of the snowballing technique was used in order to acquire further information on the issues discussed. This technique also enabled the researcher to identify any attempts at establishing a network.

4.5.3.2 Phase 2

During Phase 2, more respondents were interviewed. An additional of twelve respondents were identified and followed, with more users being introduced and more vendor developers available to be interviewed. While the users were all directly related to the specific case study, the vendor developers consisted of those who had been involved in one or more cases. The interview process conducted with developers involving multiple case studies were more challenging, since they tended to make comparisons between the two cases. On the other hand, it was a straightforward process of interviews for the users and the developers that involved one case study. Similar to Phase 1, respondents were required to identify their role in the project and to identify retrospectively any challenges encountered during the development.

In dealing with the vendor‟s developers, who had been involved in more than one case study, the respondent was asked to tell a story of what happened in each of the case studies. The tendency for the respondent to make comparisons between different case studies made the interview process more interesting. In this situation, the researcher probed with questions like “How?” or “Why?” in order to encourage the respondent to further elaborate their stories. Similar to the first phase, the respondents identified other actors that either accommodated or hindered the progress of the development for the researcher to follow-on.

4.5.3.3 Phase 3

During Phase 3, the number of new respondents was decreased, since most of them had already been interviewed during the second visit. At this stage, the researcher returned to the respondents who seemed to have a better or more interesting ideas on what was happening in the project. For Case 1 and Case 3, since the project was still on-going, the researcher asked each respondent about the progress of the development – e.g. whether there was any progress from the last visits. Challenges encountered during the development were further probed to get an in-depth understanding of the issues. During Phase 3, there were no interviews conducted from Case 2. This was due to the fact that the development of the financial system was already completed and the system was deployed. Thus, no outstanding issues were left to be investigated.

4.5.3.4 Phase 4

During this final stage, our objective was just to be updated on progress of the development. From the interview responses, it was noted that there were no new issues or challenges encountered during the development. Prior issues were either resolved or maintained. One of the most important signs that the researcher experienced was when the respondents, rather than blaming others (evidence from Phase 1 interviews) for the issues that occurred, blamed themselves for such occurrences (evidence from Phase 4 interviews).