RESUMEN

The failure rate of information systems development is estimated to be greater than 65 percent. Lowering the failure rate and supporting IS success are the ultimate goals of IS practitioners and researchers. However, few studies have focused on how the IS development process leads to successful consequences. The author argues that the state of knowledge in IS development is analogous to cooking with a list of ingredients but without the recipe. This study presents a process model for successful IS development, examining success and failure cases of customer relationship management system development to elucidate what factors are critical in IS development, how the factors influence each other, and how interplays among them lead to project outcome. The proposed model helps developers understand how to avoid repeating project failure patterns and can be used for guiding new IS development.

RESUMEN

The software development global market is opening its doors to more countries, giving small organizations an opportunity to benefit from more competitive conditions. A requisite for being competitive is to adopt internationally accepted software process practices. Small organizations trying to start their own effort must carefully identify how their environment affects an improvement initiative.The authors report on the adoption of SW-CMM Level 2 in Link, a Chilean organization. This was a software process improvement initiative led by one of the authors. They explain Link's organizational environment, the initiative performed, and the factors that affected the initiative. They found a strong relationship between organizational environment and the initiative's success factors; specifically, that Link's small size helped the SW-CMM's adoption.