Exploring Governance Uncertainty in a Complex Information Systems Project

It is well known that effective governance practices improve information systems (IS) project outcomes. Broadly speaking, we know that effective governance practices involve the right people having the right knowledge at the right time. In real-life projects, however, such an ideal might be unattainable. Our case study concerns a complex IS project - the implementation of an electronic government records system. During our fieldwork, we observed substantial uncertainty associated with governance practices. Nevertheless, the project has been able to achieve fairly successful outcomes. Given the prevalence of uncertainty in our data, we turned to the existing literature to learn more about the nature and role of uncertainty within a governance context; surprisingly, we found very little work. The aim of this research-in-progress paper is to provide an initial exploration of the governance uncertainty concept and its relationships with governance knowledge and project success.