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Moral Hazard in IT Project Completion. An Analysis of Supplier and Client Behavior in Polish and German Enterprises

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 243))

Abstract

Implementing management support information systems with the use of outsourcing is the prevalent method of completing this type of project. Agency theory is one of the significant categories of theories used in the analysis of IT outsourcing. Literature studies indicate a research gap concerning the phenomenon of moral hazard in IT projects consisting in the implementation of management support information systems. The scope of this article is to present research results on the phenomenon of moral hazard amongst Polish and German clients and suppliers of MIS. The author used the case study method. The research results may be interesting for theoreticians of business informatics and for practitioners completing IT projects both in enterprises and government agencies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The ranking of theories applied to research of IT outsourcing with the use of 84 articles conducted by J. Dibbern, T. Goles, R. Hirscheim and B. Jayatilaka [2]. Theory of transaction costs—16, Strategic management theory—14, Agency theory—10, Group of resource allocation theories—9, Group of social exchange theories—7, Game theory—4, Theory of power group—2, Diffusion of innovations theory—2, Other theories, e.g. of knowledge management, risk management, psychological contract—13.

  2. 2.

    The research was carried out in 2013. It covered 500 enterprises where 895 IT projects consisting in the implementation of ERP, CRM, BI, DMS, BI and E-learning-class MIS were completed. The chosen enterprises were based in Mazovia and Lesser Poland and the research was conducted among enterprises employing less than 400 people. Research results showed that in the MIS market in Poland, the structure of agreement types is as follows: 68 %—fixed price contract, 27 %—time and material contract, 5 %—cost-reimbursable contracts.

  3. 3.

    Polish Language Dictionary (Warszawa: PWN, 1996), defines opportunism as concentrating on one's personal interest while ignoring common goals and generally assumed codes of behavior.

  4. 4.

    In one of the analyzed cases in Poland, the case-specific implementation services agreement for stage 2 was over 300 pages long, it was negotiated for 4 months, while the implementation project lasted 3 months and did not exceed 50 000 PLN (around 12 000 EUR).

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Correspondence to Bartosz Wachnik .

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Wachnik, B. (2016). Moral Hazard in IT Project Completion. An Analysis of Supplier and Client Behavior in Polish and German Enterprises. In: Ziemba, E. (eds) Information Technology for Management. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 243. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30528-8_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30528-8_5

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-30527-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-30528-8

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