The explanatory power of the Delone & McLean model in the public sector: a mixed method test

Digital inter-organisational collaboration in the public sector remains elusive: little is known about when and how efforts for reaching its potential are likely to be successful. Understanding success and failure is one thing that needs to be done to evaluate the effectiveness of public sector information system projects. A highly popular model to conduct such evaluation in the private sector is Delone & McLean's Information System Success Model. This model is often partially tested via quantitative analyses on private sector cases. Yet, this paper tests the entire model, via a mixed methodology on three inter-organisational public sector cases in Flanders in order to verify its explanatory power for the public sector. The quantitative results show that most hypotheses of the Delone & McLean model are valid and applicable to the public sector. Qualitative results reveal that this model ignores the important influence of context factors and provides managers as such only a partial view on the dimensions which contribute to IS success/failure.

Publication year:2017

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