Are you getting in the way? (on person‐dependence in information systems)

After a discussion of what we mean by ‘person‐dependence’ and how we have come to recognize it, we present some examples of this phenomenon, based on observations we have made during the course of our work as consultants and thus taken from real life, but let us assure our past and present clients that the names have been changed to protect the guilty! The case histories are presented in a fairly light‐hearted way, but when we encounter a case of person‐dependence in a client organization we certainly do not treat it lightly. After the examples we draw some tentative conclusions about the factors within organizations which can lead to person‐dependence.