Use of Post-Deployment Information to Improve the Effectiveness of IT Systems Implementation: The Case of Polish SMEs

Nowadays, systems information plays an important role in the functioning of almost all business organizations. IT tools improve the performance of internal processes, but also contacts with customers, cooperators and government units. Despite the high rate of computers and the Internet usage in Polish small and medium-sized enterprises (Giannakouris & Smihily, 2013, p. 2), it turns out that the level of effectiveness of the implementation projects and the associated efficiency of the deployed systems is relatively low. The result of implementation process depends on many economical, technical, organizational, or social determinants (McLeod & MacDonell, 2011, p. 24.2). The key success factors should include the knowledge and experience of implementation team members but also communication skills and position of project leader. Becomes important, therefore, to examine how companies collect, store and use information from the previously executed implementations in order to improve future work. This paper presents the results of research conducted among 103 Polish companies on the forms and usage of collected documentation by two parties involved in the implementation process: providers and recipients. Analysis presented in the article is a component of a broader research conducted by the author in the years 2011-2013 on the effectiveness determinants of IT systems implementation in the Polish SME sector. The article includes a characteristics of the forms and the use of implementation documentation, stresses the differences in the area of documentation usage by providers and recipients of IT services.