Why is system integration a particularly critical part of the systems development process? Suggest three sociotechnical issues that may cause difficulties in the system integration process.

What will be an ideal response?

System integration is particularly critical because it is at the integration stage that
incompatibilities between the different sub-systems or components may come to
light. Generally, the first view that a customer has of a system is after integration.
Sociotechnical difficulties that may arise are:
1. Refusal of parts of the team to recognise problems. Some developers may
refuse to recognise that their software is faulty and may try to pass the
blame for integration problems to people in different organisations.
Different organizations in the integration team are, essentially, trying to
transfer the costs to other organizations.
2. Cultural problems due to different organizational approaches to integration.
Integration is perhaps the first time that teams have had to work closely
together and their organizations may use different processes for system
integration. Reconciling these processes can be difficult.
3. Organizations may be at different stages in their project involvement. For
some organizations, integration may be their last project activity and their
objective is simply to complete and sign off the process as quickly as
possible. For other organizations, there may be later work to be done so they
may have a longer-term perspective and wish to spend more time on the
integration process.