Taiyu was a full time PhD student. After completing his MSc degree in Business Management, he had decided to study for a PhD. More specifically, Taiyu was interested in examining how organisations use information systems (IS) once they are implemented. Taiyu had noted in the business press that while many companies were eager to implement and use the various types of information systems, very often such systems were considered a failure as staff ended up not using them. The business press noted that this was a source of concern for organisations who would spend considerable amounts of money on IS with little, or no, return. Taiyu had also noted that there were very few studies which had examined how staff use IS once they are implemented. Therefore, for example, the literature had not studied staff expectations of the systems, their thoughts about the systems and their actual use of the systems.

He also wanted to look at the suitability of applying two theories for analysing his data, which he believed could be used for explaining why some IS projects are a failure and others are a success. The two theories are called Institutional Theory and Sensemaking Theory.

After completing his first year of his PhD, Taiyu was contacted by a friend who worked at the local hospital in Suzhou. His friend told him that the hospital would be completing the implementation of an Electronic Patient Record (EOR) system. The senior management at the hospital thought the time was right to implement the system, which they hoped would help the hospital to improve efficiency. Taiyus friend suggested that this would be a good opportunity for Taiyu to study how hospital staff used the EPR. The implementation of the EPR system was due to be completed at the end of April 2018.

After hearing this news, Taiyu obtained a letter from his supervisor, which he gave to senior managers at the hospital. The letter informed senior management that Taiyu was studying for his PhD and would like to study how the EPR was used by hospital staff. The letter also mentioned that the hospitals name would not be mentioned in the study and that all interviews would be anonymised. The letter also mentioned that Taiyus study had been approved by the ethics committee at his university. After Taiyu had a meeting with senior management, he was allowed access for his study. Taiyu was very relieved to hear that he had been granted access, because this was a problem for most researchers.

For the purposes of his PhD, and in consultation with his PhD supervisor, Taiyu had chosen to undertake an explanatory case study. He believed this was the most appropriate qualitative research methodology for his purposes.

Taiyu was able to gain access to the hospital in early May 2018. As the ERP system was still new to the medical team, he believed that this was a great opportunity to understand the factors which influence the use of the system. Taiyu studied the behaviour of the medical staff for six months from end of October 2018 to the early May 2020. Towards the end of the six months, he realised that the staff were repeating what he had heard in previous interviews and that it would be pointless to conduct further interviews. During the six months, he was able to collect data from two different sources. His data was primarily gathered through semi-structured interviews. In total, he was able to conduct 25 semi-structured interviews. These included members of the hospitals IT staff, the hospital staff who used the system, and mid to senior managers.

The second source of data was documents. For example, hospitals website, government white paper, internal documents, assessment reports etc.

Once Taiyu had completed his data collection, and transcribed all his semi-structured interviews, he started to analyse his data. More specifically, he used thematic analysis for analysing his data.

1.What was the business problem that Taiyu wanted to address?

2. What was the gap in the literature that he wanted to study?

3. Why do you think about Taiyu choosing an explanatory case study as his preferred qualitative research methodology?

4. Why do you think Taiyu chose to conduct semi-structured interviews, rather than structured or unstructured interviews?

5. Why do you think Taiyu decided to analyse his data using thematic analysis and how is this type of analysis performed?