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Environmental and institutional models of system development: a national criminal history system

Author:

Kenneth C. LaudonAuthors Info & Claims

Communications of the ACM, Volume 28, Issue 7

Pages 728 - 740

https://doi.org/10.1145/3894.3899

Published: 01 July 1985 Publication History

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Abstract

This article tests two competing theories of system development referred to here as environmental and institutional models. These models form the basis for most explanations of why systems are developed and utilized. We will examine both models in detail and apply them to a single set of data concerned with the emerging national computerized criminal history system (CCH). A hybrid model, which combines elements of environmental and institutional approaches, is also developed and tested. A substantive result of this new model will alter our understanding of why a national CCH system is being developed. At the theoretical level, we conclude that a hybrid model is more powerful than either an environmental or an institutional model taken separately and that future research must take this into account.

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3505227
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Index Terms

Environmental and institutional models of system development: a national criminal history system
1. Applied computing
2. Social and professional topics
  1. Computing / technology policy
  2. Professional topics
    1. Computing and business
    2. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Project and people management
        Systems development

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Reviews

Reviewer: Stephen R. Ruth

This paper offers detailed empirical evidence on testing two competing theories of system development. The environmental model includes external uncertainties and opportunities not directly controlled by the organization: hardware costs, market growth, external funding, or simply “complexity.” Institutional models focus on endogenous factors which the organization can control, such as norms, social structure, and values. The author examines one of the largest system design efforts ever undertaken, the Computerized Criminal History (CCH) system, to test the relevance of the two models—environmental and institutional—in the devleopment process. The CCH, which consists of 195,000 criminal history records in the United States on over 36 million individuals active in the labor force, is easily one of the largest public sector databases. The author considers CCH from three perspectives: adoption, utilization, and management of the systems. Extensive data are available as each state in the US adopts the CCH, and skillfully groups relatively prosaic numbers into these three perspectives. For example, Laudon uses crime rates per 100,000 citizens and prisoners per 100,000 citizens as proxy variables for environmental factors. Similarly, megabytes per capita is used as an institutional factor. The results are quite interesting because there is clear evidence that neither model is clearly predictive. The environmental model is not supported since “the actual use of these systems (CCH) is not related to crime rates at all” (p. 739). A blend of the theories is called for. As the author concludes: Management scientists and students of MIS who see systems primarily as responses to environmental “needs” of an organization and social scientists who see systems primarily resulting from the working-out of organizational forces may both be over-simplifying.

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Published In

Communications of the ACM Volume 28, Issue 7

July 1985

85 pages

ISSN:0001-0782

EISSN:1557-7317

DOI:10.1145/3894

Editor:
Peter Denning

Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 01 July 1985

Published in CACM Volume 28, Issue 7

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Goualard F(2022)Drawing Random Floating-point Numbers from an IntervalACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation10.1145/350351232:3(1-24)Online publication date: 11-Apr-2022
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