Information Systems Projects in Contact Centers - Enterprise Information Systems Design, Implementation and Management: Organizational Applications - page 388

in a contact center. Aksin and Harker (Aksin &
Harker, 2003) explain the importance of informa-
tion systems in the capacity planning of a contact
center.
Regarding project management, several studies
(Demarco, 1997; Ewusi-Mensah, 2003; Standish
Group, 1996, 1998; Yetton, Martin, Sharma, &
Johnston, 2000) indicate misspecifications and
poor requisites decomposition and vision as some
of the main reasons for project failure. Chaos
Reports (Standish Group, 2006) indicate a lower
level of success for information system projects,
despite the positive evolution in the latest years.
CCIS projects exhibit many particularities.
For example, an inbound information service is
totally different of an inbound emergency service
like 911. Processes, agent's skills, response time,
liability, are some of the main differences.
The characteristics of an in-house contact
center are also different from one outsourced at
a Service Bureau where, among other issues, it's
necessary to negotiate project results, service
levels, know-how transfer and confidentiality.
For the Service Bureau, it is substantially dif-
ferent whether the project needs integration with
client's systems or the project doesn't need any
kind of integration.
A distributed contact center communications,
data infrastructure and project approaches may be
substantially different from one with a centralized
architecture.
Finally, contact centers vary from few agents
to hundreds or thousands agents.
In short, information systems play an important
role in a contact center and there are different
approaches to design and manage CCIS projects
leading to the following research questions:
which are the relevant factors to consider in a
CCIS project? How do project managers further
characterize those factors?
These reasons justified our previous study in
order to identify and characterize concepts and the
organizational, social and technological context
of the contact centers project management area.

The result was the framework presented in the
previous section.
Due to contact centers' growth and changing
environment, our goal in this work was to verify,
expand and actualize the existent framework.
Contact center is a multidisciplinary area that
crosses marketing, operational research, psychol-
ogy, sociology and information systems, among
others, so CCIS projects are complex, involving
a multiple kind of actors and interests.
All research is based on some underlying philo-
sophical assumptions about what constitutes valid
research and which research methods are appropri-
ate (Myers, 1997). To accomplish our present goal,
an interpretative approach was followed because
of the multidisciplinary and complex reality of
the contact centers and the relation between the
observer team and the object of study.
In recent years, interpretive research has
emerged as an important strand in information
systems research (Walsham, 1995). Interpretive
research can help information systems research-
ers to understand human thought and action in
social and organizational contexts; it has the po-
tential to produce deep insights into information
systems phenomena including the management
of information systems and information systems
development (Klein & Myers, 1999).
After choosing a proper approach, next step
was to choose the research method. There has
been a general shift in information systems re-
search away from technological to managerial
and organizational issues, hence an increasing
interest in the application of qualitative research
methods (Myers, 1997). The goal of this study was
to verify, actualize and expand the framework with
the relevant factors to consider in the CCIS project
and their characterization. It was therefore crucial
to identify contact center specialists who have the
necessary experience and knowledge to provide
a characterization of the phenomena involved.
The need to capture such knowledge sug-
gests looking for people with a wide experience
in the area, ten years, say. The goal was to find