Are Critical Success Factors Always Valid for Any Case? A Contextual Perspective

The critical success factor (CSF) concept systematically highlights the key areas which management should carefully consider in order to realize its performance goals. By understanding the CSFs for the implementation of a system, an organization can successfully determine the issues that critically affect the process, enabling it to eliminate or avoid any problems that might contribute to its failure. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the CSFs presented in the literature are always valid for any case. It reports an exploratory case study which adopted a qualitative methodology to achieve a deep understanding of the CSFs for learning management system (LMS) implementation in Saudi Arabia from the students' perspective. Having identified these CSFs, it compares them with those reported by other studies in the literature. The results indicate that such CSFs are not similar in all contexts. Studying the change in its context is in fact found to be significant and information system success is determined to be not a purely technical issue but a socio-technical one. Accordingly, the widely recognized CSFs are undeniably beneficial but not sufficient to ensure the success of LMS implementation.