Splitting the contexts

Another major breakthrough in the current research is differentiating between the organisational and, at a macro level, the country contexts in the revised framework. Any organisation is an entity of a wider context, which normally get influenced by environmental factors. As mentioned earlier in chapter 6, KU is one of the independent bodies of the Kuwaiti government and its subordination returns to the MoHE. However, KU follows the decrees and laws laid down by the government and prescribed by the Kuwaiti parliament (NA). Also, the administrative procedures and decisions of KU are subject to the supervision of the regulatory institutions in the State, especially regarding the purchase of any new IS, such as: the State Audit Bureau (SAB), the Central Tenders Committee (CTD), and the Central Agency for Information Technology (CAIT). The existing of this quantum of regulatory and supervisory institutions may be beneficial in terms of transparency in administrative procedures of the University; however, it is at the same time significantly contributing to the administrative bureaucracy, which the vast majority of participants in the interviews expressed their dissatisfaction about. They considered the bureaucracy and the long documentary cycle, in particular the purchasing procedures, is causing one of the major negative influences on the outcome of IT projects.

We believe that McLeod and MacDonell have erred in placing the Organisational Properties and Environmental Conditions within the Institutional Context of their framework. Those two factors have different characteristics to be kept within the same category.

Actually, the data collected through this research demonstrate that Environmental Conditions, as a macro-level, has a direct impact on the Organisational Properties within the government structure, and through their subordination to the governmental legislations. It is also forcing the organisations to follow the governmental routine actions, which they have no control over, and leads to disrupt any action that requires dealing with other governmental parties. Clearly, this prevents governmental organisations from being bound or able to take all decisions completely independently, without the supervision or mediation of other government bodies.

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The case here about Kuwait University, whom have to deal with up to 3 governmental bodies when they intend to purchase new technological systems, as specified earlier in chapter 5. In Kuwait, any purchasing transaction carried out by a governmental organisation goes through a tender in a long documentary life-cycle process. Whereas the responsibility of tender goes to the CTC and the CAIT; the administrative procedure auditing lays under the responsibility of the SAB.

This long bureaucratic procedure, or as called by some participants “excessive” or

“extreme” bureaucracy (P1, P3, P5, P6, P11, P12, P15, P19, P21, P22, P23), made the

majority of the participants show their annoyance from the long-awaited time and they described it as one of the most important factors that leads to delay the delivery, not only in the two discussed projects in this study, but also many other ISD projects. They associated these frequent delays in the ISD projects to the time that the governmental procedures consume, which took few years to complete in same cases (P1, P3, P15, P19, P21). They stressed on the idea that the government need to seriously consider changing the long bureaucratic procedures of some of its body and they should not apply, for example, the same bedding system procedures, “on such a rapid changing industry like technology”. The project managers (P6, P12, P18), the top managers (11,

12, 22, 23), and the middle-tier managers (P3, P15, P21) indicated that planning for the anticipated long documentary life-cycle and bureaucratic procedures of other governmental bodies, which have an indirect relationship with the ISD projects in KU, is a typically part of any their ISD projects planning. However, they all mentioned that this step is not always enough to anticipate the time required to get them done.

A section head at KUCIS (P21), gave an example of one of those irrationally long procedures when they made a request to deal with a technical consultant to provide training session for her team as one of the requirements in the Request For Proposal (RFP) document of Project B. The specifications of the consultant have been precisely defined to the CTC, as is the case in any RFP booklet. One of the most important specifications is that the person should be certified with: Oracle Certified Professional (OCP) - Oracle Application Server (version 10g) Administrator, and Oracle Fusion Middleware (version 10g). By the time the tender was awarded, the newer upgrade

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version of Oracle was already released (11g) and Oracle was awarding certifications for people who pass the examination of their newer version.

One of the companies that bid for the tender provided the required evidence that their expert consultant is certified with the newest version of Oracle (11g); however, that bid was rejected because of that person. The tendering process that almost took a year to complete was under the responsibility of the CTC which commented that this person does not meet the required specifications. They mentioned that the RFP booklet defined the consultant's specifications to be certified as Oracle 10g not 11g, which did not apply to the consultant nominated by the company.

The company had to appeal on the result and raise a complaint about the giving reason for being rejected, as their consultant is an expert and was already certified with Oracle (10g) as well. They however, thought that providing the latest certification would give preference to their consultant, since the upgraded version was already released by Oracle.

According to (P21), KUCIS was expecting this company to win the tender as they were dealing with them for years and they built a reliable and professional relationship during these years. Therefore, KUCIS sent letters to the CTC trying to explain that this consultant has actually all the attributes they were requiring. They tried to explain that this person is very well qualified and could provide better training to their staff members.

After much correspondence between those parties, which typically consumed a long period of time, that company finally won the tender. However, only after almost 3 years from the date of requesting that system, KUCIS did not get the benefit from that training because that system was upgraded during this long time. However, the company, informally and kindly, accepted to replace that old training with the newer release for the upgraded system, instead of the old one. Otherwise, they would have to go through the same procedure again.

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As it could be seen from the giving examples, the responses of almost all participants believe that the governmental procedures, as part of the environmental context of the organisation, could cause a massive impact on the ISD projects.