SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ASPECTS OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY PROJECTS

Power and politics are indispensable to any social institution. By the same logic, formal organizations are not the exceptions rather battlegrounds for playing political games to hold and maintain power in the group, organization and community. Given this, if a project is perceived disturbing for the existing power structures, it is resisted by those who find their power threatened. Information in itself is a powerful resource thereby vital to political capacity of those who hold it against those who don’t. This paper carves out the political strings in the development, use and maintenance of computer-based information systems (CBIS) in public and private organizations of any size, structure and power with a view to coming up with a logically interwoven layout of the problem and solution models.