6. A hermeneutic analysis of the Denver International Airport Baggage Handling System
Stasys Lukaitis, School of Information Systems, Deakin University Jacob Cybulski, School of Information Systems, Deakin University

Abstract This paper attempts to demonstrate the principles of hermeneutics in an effort to understand factors affecting Information Systems (IS) projects. As hermeneutics provides a systematic method of interpreting text from multiple information sources, thus, Information Systems being prima facie defined and documented as text documents, are eminently suited for this mode of investigation. In this paper, we illustrate hermeneutics by analysing a sample case study document describing the well-known Denver International Airport (DIA) Automated Baggage Handling System project, which was extensively reported in the IS and management press and studied by Montealegre and his colleagues. As a result of the hermeneutic approach to the analysis of this document, a new ‘flexibility’ factor has been discovered to play an important, yet unreported, role in the DIA system demise. In the DIA case, the observed flexibility factor influenced the quality of the interaction between the actors, the prevailing environment and the information systems.

Introduction Although there are several reports of information systems projects that have applied hermeneutics (Boland, 1991; Klein and Myers, 1999; Myers, 1994a), there are very few publications that explain the actual hermeneutic process taken by IS (and in fact, also non-IS) researchers. What this paper strives to do is close the methodological gap and to present one potential framework for the adoption of hermeneutics in the study of information systems. In addition, hermeneutics is often viewed as an ‘obscure’ tool in the IS community because it is perhaps not particularly well understood. To that end, this