Social Construction of Bespoke Software for Higher Education Management in a Sub-Saharan African Country

Abstract

This research set out to understand why and how higher education institutions in sub-Saharan Africa countries opt to develop bespoke IS instead of packaged proprietary software. The literature on Higher Education Information Systems (HEIS) stresses the selection, adoption and implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) packages in higher education institutions paying touching briefly on the development of bespoke software for higher education management. This study extends the existing knowledge on HEIS and Information Systems Development (ISD) research by drawing on the IS interpretive case study approach and the theoretical lens of the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) to trace the choice and development of in-house bespoke software in two higher education institutions in Ghana, a sub-Saharan African country. Findings of the study revealed that higher education institutions find bespoke software development more cost effective than packaged software implementation and are motivated to develop bespoke solutions in-house because of the need to develop organizational capabilities and skills that would meet the information needs of the institutions. More also, the study revealed that rigid organizational cultures and practices of public higher education institutions can influence the choice of technological platforms adopted for bespoke development. Again, in terms of having access to software source codes, there are no major differences between the use of open source and proprietary tools for in-house bespoke software development. This study also extends the limited scope of HEIS from the dominant focus of ERP adoption and implementation to the development of bespoke software for higher education management. Finally, the study suggests that further research be extended into the decommissioning process of bespoke software and the security of bespoke information systems as it is beyond the scope of the SCOT theory used in this study.