INFORMATION SYSTEMS FAILURE EXPLAINED THROUGH
THE LENS OF THE CULTURAL WEB
David Avison
ESSEC Business School, Paris, France
David Wilson
University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
Abstract: This paper provides a discussion of the Australian telecommunications company One.Tel Limited. The
paper examines the information technology strategies employed by the company and assesses the extent to
which a failure of those strategies may have contributed to, or precipitated, the downfall of the business. In
particular, it looks at the company through the lens of Johnson and Scholes’ (1993) cultural web. This
perspective provides clear evidence of failings at the company, which were likely to have led to failure in its
IT/IS policy and applications which, in turn, at least partly explains the downfall of the business.
1 INTRODUCTION
The paper represents our interpretation of
documentation in the public domain about the
collapse of the Australian telecommunications
company One.Tel, much of this being from
published reports, web sites, newspaper cuttings etc.,
along with several interviews with an IT project
manager working at One.Tel during this period. In
examining the elements of the Johnson and Scholes’
(1993) cultural web in this context, it quotes widely
from the text of Barry (2002). This cultural web
model proves to be a useful tool to understand
One.Tel’s failure and could be used to analyse other
companies.
The One.Tel company was founded in 1995, and
ceased trading in 2001. During its relatively brief
existence One.Tel occupied a position in the second
rank of Australian telecommunication companies.
The notoriety that it gained as a result primarily of
its high profile directors probably exceeded its
position in the market place. One.Tel was declared
insolvent in June 2001 and is now in the process of
being liquidated. There is also a court case
proceeding against Jodee Rich, one of the company
directors.
A history of One.Tel can be found in Avison
and Wilson (2002) and Barry (2002). In brief,
One.Tel Limited was founded in 1995 and grew at a
very substantial rate, and accomplished a great deal
in a short time. The strategy in the early years was
"customers not cables" (One.Tel Annual Report,
1999), as it hired the hardware and technology from
other companies. However, based on the published
figures, the dramatic growth in One.Tel's subscriber
base in its final 18 months of trading was achieved
only by incurring losses on a grand scale.
Of particular interest was the unusual culture of
the company, driven by its joint managing director,
Jodee Rich. It was a major differentiator compared
to the competing telecommunications companies,
which are much more conventional, and it was also
designed to maximise staff productivity at minimum
cost. We examine the company culture later through
the lens of the cultural web.
One.Tel also saw itself as a very powerful
marketer and brand builder. The company presented
itself as young, colourful, and dynamic. It claimed
that the One.Tel brand was instantly recognisable in
seven countries (One.Tel Annual Report, 2000). It
deliberately distanced itself as far as possible from
the established telecommunications companies,
whose image tends to be much more staid. It openly
targeted the youth market, on the basis that young
people often have no allegiance to the established
carriers, were attracted by the company's youthful
style, and often have substantial disposable incomes.
Much has been written in the press about the
reasons for One.Tel’s rapid descent into insolvency.
Most of the material has focused upon the apparent
failings of the company’s high profile joint
managing directors, Jodee Rich and Bradley
Keeling. The focus on these leading players, and
Lachlan Murdoch representing News Corporation
203
Avison D. and Wilson D. (2004).
INFORMATION SYSTEMS FAILURE EXPLAINED THROUGH THE LENS OF THE CULTURAL WEB.
In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, pages 203-210
DOI: 10.5220/0002607902030210
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

and James Packer representing PBL (two major
Australian media companies that latterly took up
nearly 50% of the ownership of One.Tel), though
understandable from a journalistic viewpoint, has
underplayed the impact of IT failure.
2 A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE
FAILURE
The IT strategies operating within One.Tel were not
adapted to meet the rapid growth that ensued. It
suggests that the methods that had served adequately
in the early years, were not appropriate for the
middle years. The delivery of IT systems for a full-
service large-scale telecommunications company
requires a high degree of professionalism and long
term planning.
2.1 Systems Development
Systems development at One.Tel seems to exemplify
the "initial" level of maturity described by the
Carnegie Mellon University's Capability Maturity
Model. The characteristics of this level are "chaotic,
ad hoc, heroic; unorganised, uncoordinated; high
variance, unpredictable, crisis management" (Paulk
et al, 1993). The teams of young and highly paid
technicians at One.Tel thrived in this environment.
Systems were delivered in quick time for billing, call
centre, dealer management and debt collection,
among many others. Only two significant systems
were outsourced: the financial system and a data
warehouse application used to generate key
performance indicators.
Further, most of the One.Tel staff were tied into
productivity bonus schemes. The bonuses that
applied to the IT development staff were linked to
code delivered by an agreed date. The normal case
was for a developer to write and test his own code
and release direct into production, all by the due
date. At this point he could get the task signed off
and apply for his bonus. There was a significant
incentive to deliver code by a particular date no
matter how shoddily written, often with no
documentation, and with the most cursory testing.
It would have been more professional to have
peer code review before signing off; documentation
completed, checked, and filed; quality assurance
completed by testing team; user acceptance (if
relevant/appropriate); and managed release into
production. Without these steps in place, such a
bonus system is likely to deliver large amounts of
shoddy bug-ridden code.
2.2 Billing System
The One.Tel billing system was one of the first
systems to be developed when the new company
commenced trading in 1995. The billing system was
designed and developed entirely in-house by a team
of young and enthusiastic programmers and it was a
classic representation of the One.Tel approach to
building systems.
In the euphoric atmosphere that prevailed within
One.Tel in the early years, the systems developers
acquired a high reputation and status. Every time
some critical new functionality was required, the
development team produced a champion who would
work night and day to produce a result. However,
specifications, documentation and standards suffered
in this atmosphere. This lack of discipline was
understandable and not unusual at this stage in the
growth of the firm and its IT systems, but became
problematical, particularly in the case of the billing
system. Companies depend on the unfailing
timeliness and accuracy of this system for their cash
flow, and One.Tel was no exception. In the long
term, some serious flaws in the billing system at
One.Tel revealed themselves.
The first major flaw was a long-term dependence
on an inadequate design. The original system was
designed and developed by developers, including
programmers, under conditions of great stress and
urgency. It should have been viewed as only a short-
term solution. However, the basic system remained
in production, relatively unchanged, until the
termination of business in 2001. The system lacked
flexibility, and was supported by inadequately
designed database tables. It became impossible to
accommodate, within the database, the complex
sales plans, which were an important part of
One.Tel's marketing strategy. The system became
increasingly dependent upon hard-coding to provide
functionality. Consequently the individual programs
became exceedingly complex, and the system
increasingly difficult to maintain.
The second major flaw was a lack of checks and
balances. The system failed to provide the most
basic financial integrity checks. It was impossible to
reconcile the value of bills produced in a billing run,
either backwards to the calls loaded from the
carriers, or forwards to the value finally posted to
the General Ledger. There were no checks at each
stage of value loaded, value billed, or value posted.
In the final year of its operation, the system was
producing 600,000 bills per month and, apart from
the most basic visual checking, the company had no
means to verify their accuracy. Auditors might have
demanded more rigorous controls, but according to
Lecky (2001), the auditors claimed surprise at the
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company's troubles and declared that all had been
well in June 2000.
The third major flaw was a lack of prioritisation
and forward planning. Proper priority was not given
to major enhancements required to the billing
system. Two conspicuous examples of this were the
implementation of the Goods and Services Tax
(GST) and the introduction of the NextGen mobile
service, both in 2000. In the case of GST, not only
were these changes implemented one month late, but
they were so poorly executed that it caused billing
run times to increase by about 50 per cent. The
changes to accommodate NextGen mobile were
implemented three months behind schedule, which
caused the first users of the new phones to wait three
months for their first bill. It would appear that
sufficient resources were not allocated in time to
meet critical deadlines. On each occasion the billing
system suffered from these failures to plan, and the
result was large numbers of seriously delayed and
frequently inaccurate bills.
2.3 Failure of IT Strategy
As we have seen, there was a failure to recognise the
weaknesses within the billing system in sufficient
time to take effective corrective action. It is true that
a great deal of remedial work took place in the last
nine months of the system's life, but this was ‘too
little, too late’.
The principal strategic failure took place in 1999
when One.Tel received a massive injection of
funding and started from being a junior local
telecommunications company to a full-service
international operation. At this time, when funds
were plentiful, and substantial change and growth
was in prospect, it was necessary to develop a long-
term plan. However, no such planning took place,
the assumption presumably being that a
management-by-crisis approach could continue to
deliver systems to serve the company.
Several years must have been formulated at
boardroom level as much of it was published in the
Annual Reports for 1999 and 2000. For example, the
following events were all clearly on the horizon:
• Significant growth on all business fronts:
fixed wire, mobile, and ISP;
• Introduction of cut-price local call plans;
• Introduction of NextGen mobile;
• Introduction of GST from July 2000.
All of these changes were to have a significant
impact upon the billing system, which was unable to
cope with substantial increases in volume and
complexity. As noted by Elliott and Gluyas (2001)
"One.Tel ... failed to reinvest in the advanced
customer management systems needed for a mass
consumer market".
In 1999, two major projects were commenced
which absorbed the majority of the IT funding and
most of the talented people. These were a
replacement call centre system and a database
replication/fallback system. While these projects
were not without merit, they were less fundamental
than the billing system, which was seen as non-
glamorous and technically non-challenging and was
starved of resources.
As described above, the billing system survived
relatively intact until the introduction of GST in July
2000, but this caused run times to expand by around
50%. The billing system depended upon one cycle
being processed every three days. If the cycle
processing time exceeded three days, bills were
inevitably produced late. After GST, it was taking 6-
7 days to complete a bill cycle. Further, large
numbers of bills were calculated incorrectly and
needed to be reprinted.
While a rectification team was trying to improve
throughput, two further complications were added to
the system. Firstly, the data replication team
launched their solution, which further increased the
load on the struggling system. Secondly, the
NextGen mobile team finally completed their input
to the billing system, three months behind schedule.
This introduced yet more loading and another round
of incorrect bills, which needed re-calculation.
At this point, late in the year 2000, the company
realised that it had a crisis on its hands and
maintenance and improvement of the billing system
became the absolute priority. However, the system
never recovered from the GST problems in July
2000, and from that time onwards the production of
bills was always from three to six weeks behind
schedule.
The progressive failure of the One.Tel billing
system affected the business in a number of ways.
Firstly, the delay of up to six weeks in despatching
bills had a dramatic effect on cash flow. Gottliebsen
(2001) calculated that the six-week delay, combined
with the normal six-week delay in receiving call data
records from the carriers, meant that One.Tel needed
at least $120 million extra in working capital to
cover the cash flow gap. Secondly, One.Tel's billing
system had a great propensity for producing
incorrect bills, for reasons already described. While
these were sometimes identified and corrected, often
they were not. The One.Tel call centre was
constantly besieged with callers making complaints
about their bills, and caller waiting times became
intolerable. Customers with incorrect bills who
cannot gain satisfaction are not inclined to pay them.
Gottliebsen (2001) further observed that slow paying
customers meant an even greater strain on working
INFORMATION SYSTEMS FAILURE EXPLAINED THROUGH THE LENS OF THE CULTURAL WEB
205

capital and the amount was growing daily. When the
company ceased trading, debtors stood at $170
million (Trute, 2001). Of this, $75 million was more
than 120 days old, which effectively meant that
these debts would never be collected.
Perhaps the most damning effect of the failure of
the billing system was that it brought the company
into serious disrepute. For many customers, the bill
is the only regular contact that they have with their
telecommunications supplier, and frequently it is all
the contact they need or want. If the bills do not
appear, or are suspected to be inaccurate, then there
will be a general loss of confidence in the business.
The media then fuelled this loss of confidence with
many derisory articles about One.Tel and its
problems. Some examples of adverse press have
been "the billing system was appalling" (Howarth,
2001) and "some customers never even got a bill"
(Elliott and Gluyas, 2001). Gottliebsen (2001)
summed it up: "The One.Tel billing problems were
like a fault in an aircraft. Discovered on the ground
it may mean long delays, but if discovered in the air
it is often fatal".
Two critical dates in the history of One.Tel are
17th May 2001, the date of the crisis board meeting,
and 30th May 2001, the date the administrators were
called in. Originally the major investors, News and
PBL, were going to underwrite a rights issue of $132
million to rescue the company. However, by the end
of May they had decided that the company was not
salvageable. During this period the billing system
was thoroughly scrutinised by PBL information
technology experts. Their conclusions were not
published, but it is most likely that they concluded
that the system was beyond early repair. We also
know that the media was full of anecdotes and
witticisms about the parlous state of One.Tel's
systems. Perhaps the One.Tel business may have
been able to be saved, but there is a strong likelihood
that News and PBL decided that One.Tel's
reputation had become so tarnished that they no
longer wished to be associated with it. We will now
look at the failure from the viewpoint of the cultural
model.
4 ONE.TEL IN THE CONTEXT OF
A CULTURAL MODEL
Johnson and Scholes (1993) cultural web (Figure 1)
has six elements around the organisational paradigm,
which describes the overall picture of an
organisation. We will describe each element in turn
and provide examples in the specific context of
One.Tel.
4.1 Organisational structures
Organisational structures are most clearly and
traditionally evidenced in an organisation chart
showing hierarchy, reporting structures and job
grading. Management style, location of employees
and patterns of informal contact can provide further
evidence. Formal and informal organisation
structures suggest other important relationships and
support of power structures.
Rich is quoted in Barry (2002) as saying that
One.Tel has a ‘flat management structure, no
hierarchies’ (p64). Organisational charts were
banned (p76). The directors worked in hands-on
mode, and there was almost no middle management
(One.Tel Annual Report, 2000). In the early days
everyone sat together on ‘one floor with no
partitions, offices or corridors, and everyone mucked
in’ (p75). Although the flat management structure
might have worked for 30 people it could not work
for 3000 as its staff numbers became. According to
Barry (p186) ‘finding the person responsible for
doing a particular job could be a nightmare. The
telephone list didn’t tell you who did what, and no
one had offices, so new managers found themselves
wondering down the rows of [desks], asking for
people by name. The lack of job titles made it easy
for people to claim that it was not their job to do
what was needed’.
Organisational
paradigm
Stories
Symbols
Rituals and
routines
Organisational
Structures
Power
structures
Control
systems
Figure 1: Cultural web (modified from Johnson and
Scholes, 1993)
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One.Tel was an example of a ‘Random’
organization (Constantine, 2001). On the positive
side it tried to be egalitarian, innovative, and
exciting, while on the other side it also tended to be
chaotic and unstable. Management saw their role to
be that of preparing the ground for their creative
people.
Compared to many organisations, the flat
structure at One.Tel might be assumed to have given
higher status to information systems: the IT manager
reported to Rich himself. On the other hand, the lack
of management structure seemed to imply a lack of
status to all but Rich and his top management team.
4.2 Control systems
High status individuals and groups have control over
resources and working practices, and the autonomy
is reflected in the organisation’s control systems.
These include methods of appraisal and reward,
promotion opportunities and grading, employee
development, and methods of funding and
evaluation. They support the organisational
paradigm to ‘emphasise what is important to the
organisation, and focus attention and activity’
(Johnson and Scholes, 1993). The way in which
IS/IT is funded, responsibility accounting relating to
information systems and the way in which IS
projects are justified, might be indicative of the
status of the IS function.
According to Barry (2002), during the period of
One.Tel’s existence, it was increasingly in chaos.
Neither its managers nor its systems had kept pace
with its growth. One senior accountant argued that
‘it was the perfect example of how not to manage a
company. It was run like a family business or a fish
and chip shop. It had 3000 employees, but it was
still like a company with ten… The place was a joke.
There were no structures, no accounting systems, no
processes, and no controls’ (p185).
If budget size alone were an indication of status,
then IS/IT would have high status in many
companies. However, Earl (1989) identifies the
question of ‘how much should we spend on IT’ as
‘the dominant concern’ when attempting to resolve
‘the funding issue’. However, in One.Tel, it was a
lack of willingness to invest in a replacement billing
system, amongst others, that proved very costly.
Regarding control of people, despite Rich’s
espoused philosophy of empowering people, only
those people that did not stand up to him were
promoted. A senior member of the finance team
when discussing Rich argued that ‘if you have good
managers, you give away decision making. If you
have yes men, you keep control. And he was a
control freak’ (Barry, 2002 p231).
Regarding control exercised through payment to
IT staff, most of the One.Tel staff were tied into
productivity bonus schemes. This fitted in well with
their philosophy of driving staff to the utmost.
However the bonuses that applied to the IT
development staff were linked to code delivered by
an agreed date. The normal case was for a developer
to work flat out to write and test his own code and
release direct into production, all by the due date. At
this point he could get the task signed off and apply
for his bonus. There was thus a significant incentive
to deliver code by a particular date no matter how
shoddily written, with no documentation, and with
the most cursory testing. Maximum productivity was
encouraged at the expense of quality and
thoroughness.
4.3 Power Structures
Power structures are not necessarily made explicit
by the organisation chart, which may only imply
powerful groupings, devolution of authority and
influential personalities. Decision-making may be
centralised, devolved throughout the organisation or
exist in pockets of authority.
In relation to information systems, a powerful
champion for the business unit may increase its
status. Devolution of responsibility and authority
throughout the organisation may provide unit heads
with the ability to reflect their attitude towards IS/IT
in their buying decisions. Power structures might be
identified by exploring such areas as the type of
decisions made by information systems
professionals, how the IS/IT strategy is formulated,
and the means by which IS strategy is linked to
business needs.
In the euphoric atmosphere that prevailed within
One.Tel in the early years, the systems developers
acquired a high reputation and status. Every time
some critical new functionality was required, the
development team produced a champion who would
work night and day to deliver a result. However,
specifications, documentation and standards suffered
in this atmosphere. This lack of discipline was
understandable and not unusual at this stage in the
growth of the firm and its IT systems, but it was
problematical, particularly in the case of the billing
system.
Although the general atmosphere at One.Tel was
one of ‘fantastic camaraderie’ and ‘one big happy
family’ with an aim to be ‘fun and friendly’ (Barry,
2002 pp74-75), Rich’s management style was
autocratic. As he told Rodney Adler, a former
partner, ‘either you’re with me 100 per cent or
you’re not’ (p13). If goals set by Rich were seen as
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unrealistic, staff were told that ‘if you can’t do it
then you are not the one for the job’ or, worse,
‘you’re not a team player … you’re not a One.Tel
person’ (p108).
Another senior, Paul Fleetwood, remembers Rich
coming to his desk with his phone light blinking and
being asked ‘Don’t you want to work for this
company? I left you a message half an hour ago and
you haven’t answered it. Don’t let me ever see that
again’ (Barry, p76).
As we have seen, One.Tel’s billing system could
not do the job with so many new customers. The
software designed for tens of thousands of customers
had to cope with 750000. Barry (2002) argues
(p192) that the obvious answer was to scrap the old
system and build a new one, but no one in the IT
department had the guts to say to Rich ‘we can’t
make it work’.
The power structure was such that everyone
around Rich was simply a ‘yes man – it was a
company of managers who did what they were told.
‘His whole style was to intimidate’ says one
accountant, ‘he wondered why no one told him the
truth. That’s because when they did he would tear
shreds off them’ (Barry, 2002 p 231).
4.4 Stories
An organisation’s culture may be apparent through
its stories and myths. The stories that are retold may
reinforce the status of a group. Such stories include
those about employees who tried to ‘beat the
system’, runaway projects, spectacular successes or
failures, or the project leader who never seems to go
home. The stories, through telling of the unusual,
may reinforce the culture of the organisation or
alienate one business unit from that culture.
There were many One.Tel stories, but one was
particularly important to Rich who required that all
new recruits be able to recite. They would be asked
to define a team player, to which the correct answer
was ‘someone who enjoyed others’ success and
shared’ (Barry, 2002 p75). The IT floor featured a
Greek mythology theme, with a picture of Theseus
and the Minotaur in the maze. Underneath was the
moral of the story: don’t be secretive (Barry, p78).
The stories told by Rich to many added up to a
dream, which later proved to be a nightmare. When
Murdock and Packer invested in One.Tel, they had
not insisted on having their own finance director in
One.Tel to look after their AU$710 million
investment. ‘It appeared that they were too dazzled
by the dream’ (Barry, 2002 p 134).
Customers were asked to tell their One.Tel
stories to friends, later these were very negative
stories which obviously harmed the company. In
2001, the Ombudsman, John Pinnock, wrote to
One.Tel that ‘it is clear that there are systemic
problems in dealing with customer complaints. I am
also most concerned that recent letters and emails
from various employees at One.Tel show a complete
lack of understanding and acceptance of One.Tel’s
obligations … to its customers’. Later he was to
observe to the press that the company ‘did not seem
to care’.
4.5 Rituals and routines
Pentland and Rueter (1994) suggest that routines are
used to explain the inertial quality of organisational
structure and see them as the cornerstone of theories
of organisational learning and adaptation.
‘Routines…are essentially complex patterns of
social interaction’. The literature on routines
encompasses the cognitive processes of individuals
and structural and institutional constraints. Routines
should not be thought of as mindless or automatic
but that they are an effortful accomplishment.
Routines and rituals share common roots as any
moves are shaped by the physical and ritual
dimensions of organisational structure as well as the
need to draw on cognitive resources distributed
among individuals. Pentland and Rueter (1994)
argue that the enabling and continuing structures that
typify organisational work situations – such as
hierarchy, division of labour task-specific and
situation-specific issues – naturally give rise to
regular patterns of action, or routines.
Procedures and how they are followed, the
organisation’s rituals and routines may give an
indication of what is rewarded and valued by the
organisation. Martin et al. (1995) acknowledge the
importance of the rituals and routines to the
information systems function when suggesting that
‘the new systems that work best are those that are
aligned not only with the business but also with the
way people think and work’. Rituals and routines
might include the coffee break and the office party,
but in an IS context, might also include the use or
abuse of IS development methods and the
conventions surrounding the interaction between IS
professionals and users. As Avison and Fitzgerald
(2003) argue, a methodological information systems
development may be appropriate for smaller firms,
but can cause many problems as the company grows.
Some aspects at One.Tel could be said to be
enlightened, Rich had decreed that ‘software
developers should sit with the people who used [the
system] so that they could see the problems first
hand. And this made it user-friendly, more readily
improved and more easily fixed’ (Barry p75). Later,
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however, as pressures mounted things became more
hectic, and according to one senior programmer
‘sometimes it was not until [a software] change went
live that we found out it wasn’t working. Then we
would have to stop the whole billing system and it
would take a couple of days to correct it’ (Barry,
p193).
One.Tel tried very hard to build a ‘can-do’
mentality, where teams were encouraged to work
very hard to achieve desired results. There is
evidence that in the early years this approach met
with considerable success. Within the IT group, for
example, a number of quite sophisticated systems
were developed in an unusually short time frame.
One.Tel had written ‘beliefs and values’ which
were all about caring, sharing, positive thinking and
peer review. There were no hierarchies, no job titles,
no job descriptions – just missions. These stated
beliefs and values included ‘add and create value in
everything you do’, ‘make it better’, ‘give your
opinions’ and (as we saw earlier) ‘a happy team
means happy players’. Barry (2002, p76) observes
that ‘there was more than an element of a religion or
cult about it all. And those who didn’t follow the
leader risked being challenged on their faith’.
One accountant who was interviewed for a job at
One.Tel asked for management accounts, business
plans and so on, but was told ‘That’s not the way we
do things’ (Barry, 2002 p248). He turned down the
job ‘as there were none of the disciplines needed to
run the business’.
4.6 Symbols
Finally, the status of an individual or group may be
evidenced in such symbols as the size and location
of their office, make and model of their company car
and the like. Little attention in the IS literature
seems to be given to this.
Despite the apparent equality and camaraderie, at
One.Tel there were teams and champions, called
One.Team and One.Champ, and the champions had
their pictures painted on the wall (Barry, p75). Thus
the espoused organisation structure was contradicted
by the symbolic pictures showing the ‘first among
equals’. Yet another cartoon on the wall was labelled
‘vitamin C’, encouraging everyone to ‘give tablets to
one another’, sharing what they knew. ‘No secrets
were allowed’ (Barry, p76).
Some symbols suggested negative interpretations
of the conventional office, thus meetings were to be
minimised and to suggest their short-term nature
they were known as ‘huddles’, perhaps around
desks, known as ‘pods’.
Later in the company’s history, two general
managers were appointed. One, George Savva, had
been with the company since 1995. He drove a
Porsche, an Alpha Romeo and a Range Rover, and
rode a Ducati. Rich himself was similarly keen on
flashy cars and enjoyed his staff to have similar
symbols, but not if they looked more impressive
than his own prestigious transport!
4.7 Organisational Paradigm
The organisational paradigm, evident at the centre of
figure 1, describes the overall picture of an
organisation as supported by the cultural web. What
differentiates the One.Tel case more than anything is
the ‘can-do’ management style. The lack of a
development methodology, the lack of formal
documentation and specifications, the CMM Level 1
heroics, the high level of maintenance, and the
quirky operating performance were not seen as
failures … on the contrary, they were lauded and
championed as excellent examples of the company
ethos. Only when the billing system started to cause
customer complaints and not meet accounting
practice was the paradigm questioned. However, it
was not questioned at the top: this would be seen as
a symbol of weakness. Jodee Rich concentrated very
much on the big picture. Cadzow (2001) suggested
his attitude was ‘why bother with petty concerns like
faulty billing systems … when you can be thinking
about global expansion’.
5 CONCLUSION
We have previously suggested (Avison and Wilson,
2002) that the failure of One.Tel had much to do
with its IT failures. However, in this paper we have
argued, through the use of the cultural web, that this
was in turn caused by the culture of the company.
Although the organisational structure had much
to commend it, being non-hierarchical and informal,
this became inappropriate as the company grew and
some degree of formality became essential.
Although the IT manager reported to Rich himself,
the lack of management structure implied a lack of
status and power. In terms of control systems, there
were no structures, no accounting systems, no
processes, and no controls. The lack of willingness
to invest in a replacement billing system, amongst
others, proved very costly. Further, One.Tel IT staff
were tied into productivity bonus schemes, and this
led to quick but poor work, again inappropriate to
the growing company. As for power structures, it
INFORMATION SYSTEMS FAILURE EXPLAINED THROUGH THE LENS OF THE CULTURAL WEB
209

would have been best to scrap the old system and
build a new one, but no one in the IT department had
the power to say this to Rich. In terms of stories and
myths, the IT floor featured a Greek mythology
theme, with a picture of Theseus and the Minotaur in
the maze. Underneath was the moral of the story:
don’t be secretive. This would be an excellent myth
if Rich would have taken suggestions from the IT
staff seriously. Obvious rituals and routines in an IS
context, include formal IS development methods
which were not used in the company. Again this is
the norm in a small company but causes many
problems in the long run.
Thus the Johnson and Scholes model has helped
us explain how a company culture might have led to
IT failings (as well as company failings). This
analysis suggests that the model could be used to
analyse other companies’ propensity for IT/IS
failure.
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