Using JAD to Bridge the Design-Reality Gaps; a Major Cause of ISProjects’ Failures in the Developing Countries; in the proceedings of The 2 nd AnnualInternational Conference on Sustainable ICT Capacity in Developing Countries, MakerereUniversity, Kampala, Uganda 6 - 9 August 2006.

Abstract

Information Systems (IS) projects failure is ‘a gap between what the users expect from an IS and how well these expectations are met by the perceived performance of the delivered system’. IS projects fail more than they succeed. IS failure rates in the Developing Countries (DCs) are much higher than those in the Industrialised Countries (ICs) because among other reasons, the gaps tend to be exaggerated by the huge difference between the ideas/IS projects and the political /behavioural realities in the DCs. These chronic failure rates have continued to place the DCs on the wrong side of the digital divide, turning IS projects and ICTs in general into a technology of inequality. Solution: employment of Joint Application Development (JAD); a software development methodology that will involve the stakeholders in the entire process of IS implementation. This paper explains how JAD can be used to eradicate most of the causes of IS projects’ failures in the DCs using the University of Nairobi case study. The CHAOS Ten Success factors have been employed to analyze data for nine IS projects.