A hermeneutic analysis of the Denver International Airport Baggage Handling System - Information Systems Foundations: Constructing and Criticising - page 67

6. Finally, another DIA centered document (Montealegre and Keil, 2000) was introduced
and its contribution to the overall understanding then analysed. The analysis pro-
ceeds from the classical approach of Gadamer (1976) whereby the movement of
understanding is from the particular to the whole then back again.
In the following sections, each of the cycles is described in some detail and examples
from the DIA case study provided to illustrate the process.
First cycle
The researchers took the approach of reading the Denver International Airport Baggage
Handling System document (Montealegre et al., 1999) 'quickly', as one would when
trying to determine a document's suitability for a more intensive read. This initial
reading created an immediate impression and started off the cycles of understanding.
It is at this early phase of understanding development that the value of critical hermen-
eutics emerges when considering the power and impact that 'simple' texts can have.
Demeterio (2001) wrote about the potential impacts of text …
... textuality can be infiltrated with power and forces that are formally con-
sidered extraneous to it and practically innocuous. Specifically, Marx argued
that textuality can be warped by capitalist and class-based ideologies; Nietz-
sche, by cultural norms; and Freud, by the unconscious. These extraneous
powers and forces are capable of penetrating deep into the text, by weaving
into its linguistic fabric. Thus, even without the cultural and temporal distances
that made romanticist hermeneutics anxious, or even without the differences
of life-worlds that bothered both phenomenological and dialectical hermeneut-
ics, there is no guarantee for the reader to be brought side by side with the
truth/meaning of a text, because textuality can be veiled by ideology and false
consciousness. The goal of this hermeneutic system is to diagnose the hidden
pathology of texts and to free them from their ideological distortions.
In the DIA case study, the initial reading takes the reader into a summary of the case
and also prepares the preliminary understanding.
The introduction to the case study commences with a summary of the project, describing
it as being beset by risks: 'the scale of the large project size; the enormous complexity
of the expanded system; the newness of the technology; the large number of resident
entities to be served by the same system; the high degree of technical and project
definition uncertainty; and the short time span for completion' (Montealegre et al., 1999,
p. 546). The bylines at the head of the case study say that 'No airport in the world is as
technologically advanced as the Denver International Airport ' (Montealegre et al., 1999),
and then almost as an aside in the same headline of the case study - 'It's dramatic. If
your bag [got] on the track, your bag [was] in pieces'.
So before even the preliminary reading has commenced, the reader has already scanned
enough of the first page of this study and already the mindset has been seeded with
notions of a highly complex project whose technological demands were so complex that
it all went off the rails [ sic ]. The mind of an 'experienced reader' 2 is by now thinking
about what classic project management problems could have led to this disaster.
The understanding that exists at this preliminary cycle is already deeply prejudiced and
biased. Questions have already been (subconsciously) set into the researcher's mind
2
The term 'experienced reader' is used to describe someone who is moderately well versed in project management methodo-
logies and who has seen or read about enough project failures to know of standard failure patterns.