The Role Of Project Success In The Relationship Between Accountability And IS Process Documentation

Abstract

We report on an experimental study of the impact of outcome bias and accountability on documentation decisions.  The subjects, working on an information system development project, decided on how much of the process details (both good and bad) known only to the project team, would be made part of an intra-organizational knowledge database. We find that outcome bias has a significant influence on decisions. Managers of “failure” projects were more inclined to report more of the bad process details than managers of “successful” projects, consistent with attribution theory.