Roles played by stakeholders in implementation of information systems:A case of equity bank in Kenya

Abstract

Equity Bank management has broken the myth and demonstrated that the indigenous Kenyans managers have the capacity to build and nurture local institutions that can compete competitively with major multinationals from the west. Several IT projects have failed both locally and globally but the success of the of the Equity Bank's IT project motivated the researcher to study and analyze the roles the managers and the IT professionals played during the implementation of information technology. The objective of the research project was to find out the roles the managers and IT professionals played during the implementation of the IT project at the Equity Bank in Kenya. Also the objective was to find out the magnitude of the involvement of these stakeholders in those roles. The population of study was composed of the internal stakeholders only. These internal stakeholders were namely the CEO and the senior managers at the Bank's headquarter at upper hill and the managers at the seven branches in Nairobi City. The stakeholders from the branches were as follows: the credit manager, operations manager and the overall branch manager. In total they were 16 instead 42 stakeholders who participate. The data collection was done using multiple choice questionnaires. Simple arithmetic and easy to draw tools from Microsoft Excell were used to summarize the information into percentages and pie charts and graphical representations for easy comparison of the magnitude of each role participated by stakeholders in the project. The findings from the research indicate that the stakeholders must be involved more in the roles in which they have expertise and they have the competence to provide leadership in those roles like IT professionals in technological activities, finance stakeholders in financial activities and the operation stakeholders in operation matters of the bank. The operation stakeholders should participate in almost all the activities of the information system project as the information system implemented will affect either positively or negatively the operations of the bank. The branch managers should be involved in the activities affecting their branch only. The bank officers V111 should be involved in: testing of the system; coming up with service needs; designing of the compensation policies; and identification of system problems. The conclusion from the analysis of the data is that for any information technology project to be successful the key stakeholders namely the IT professionals, operations specialists, the credit (finance) people and the branch managers must be fully be involved right from the project initiation (strategy formulation) to project implementation (strategy implementation). These key stakeholders are the key decision makers during the implementation of the IT project. The bank officers should be involved in the roles that will improve both their efficient and effective usage of the system when performing their duties