The computer systems

‘The regulation mechanism here is the confrontation between factors giving incentive to work (like interests, motives, aims, purposes) and factors related to carrying out the work (like conditions, activities, actions, operations). The interaction of these factors follows sociological, psychological and instrumental rules and law. Software offers new operations with new technical and specialised purposes. Familiar sequences of action with all the experience they incorporate can no longer be applied and have to be reconstructed from elemental actions according to new objectives.

But this casts doubt on the meaning of present structures and tasks. The organisation has to be reshaped, and the ultimately affects, and even infringes on people’s interests and performance’ (Falck, 1989, p. 308). While authors such as Moreton (1995) and Heatley and Argarwal and Tanniru (1995) place strong emphasis on the Information Systems (IS) impact upon the organisation I prefer to place a stronger emphasis upon the organisational culture and its impact upon the IS adopted, as will become apparent later in this paper.

Having identified some of the interesting theoretical concepts of this paper, the next section deals with the research methodology adopted. The research methodology was an in-depth case study of a particular project to introduce IT. One limitation of analysing a single case is the difficulty of determining whether the patterns found are typical. It is difficult to generalise from one case. On the other hand, studying a concrete case will have the advantage of being able to study a process in depth from start to finish (Hellevik, 1995, p. 62). An in-depth study of the process would be required to answer the research question.

Therefore a qualitative approach was chosen. Interview guides were used to loosely structure the interviews. They were designed with the following in mind: first, to establish how the informant initially got in contact with the EDBLF project. Second, to find out how the interviewees perceived the OD-process. Lastly, the informants were asked to point out the positive and negative aspects of the process and what could have been done differently. To support data obtained from interviews, archive materials from the project was used. The material consisted of minutes from steering group meetings, plans and correspondence within the project.

Additionally directives from the Army Command of Staff (Hi?? rstaben, HST) and Parliamentary documents were consulted. Finally, some of the background material on the workings of the Army derive from my own experience as a civilian employee of the Army Administration School. The paper is organised as follows: The next section describes the motivation for adopting the IT. The third section presents the organisation investigated. The fourth section presents some of the consequences of the process undertaken to adopt the new information technology. The last section presents the conclusions and some of the lessons learnt.