Masterplots in Information Systems Implementation

Abstract

Information systems (IS) implementation is essentially a social activity. Technical solutions emerge from the humans’ social interactions and cognitive processes and are then planted into the IS users’ subjective realities. These interactions are referred to as narratives, aka stories. Yet the narratives are anything but a simple form of information transfer. Rather than revealing objective facts, narratives make sense of the users’ subjective experiences from their reality, and more importantly, their surrounding context. Narratives are thus not just simple standalone stories but draw from masterplots engaging with the actors’ deeper and embedded perceptions. Both culturally and socially determined masterplots and specific, situated narratives may thus have an influential position in IS implementation. To explore the occurrence of different masterplots in large-scale IS implementation, we conducted a case study to identify and analyse the masterplots the IS actors resort to when making sense of their own professional and personal experience.