A grassroots model of decision support system implementations by construction project teams

This thesis explains grassroots implementations of decision support systems by project teams - implementations driven by the members of a project team working at the operational level - from the perspectives of the three main stakeholders that are involved in managing the life-cycle of a decision support system: project team members, technology managers of project-based companies, and developers of decision support systems. Using ethnographic data from a large infrastructure construction project in New York City the thesis shows that the project team on this project was only able to use a decision support system efficiently when the members of the project team were driving the decision support system implementation in a grassroots process. The project team members mutually structurated the technology and their knowledge throughout the grassroots implementation. They influenced the technical reality of the decision support system while at the same time being influenced by the technical reality of the system. Building on the findings of the case study, the thesis, deductively integrates existing work that can explain parts of grassroots processes into a coherent theoretical model. The model explains how members working at the operational level of a project team make sense about a newly introduced decision support system and decide to utilize it in their local context. In this way, the thesis applies social sense making theory to decision support systems implementations and positions the grassroots technology implementation model into organizational choice theory, organizational multi-level theory, and organizational change theory. Based on the theoretical model the thesis recommends that technology managers need to work closely together with local project teams during the implementation of decision support systems to support grassroots processes, instead of trying to push down standardized technology solutions through hierarchical structures. Additionally, the thesis proposes a project-centric research and software development methodology to inform the design of decision support systems that project teams need to implement in a grassroots fashion.