The problem of information sharing and coordination was made starkly evident by the September 11th attacks. September 11th illuminated the problems that justice agencies had in sharing information in a timely and collaborative nature without an interoperable data-sharing system. A number of government audits and justice agency leaders have sought to answer why justice information integration change has faced barriers to progress. Often, these reports suggest change implementers improve their attention to stakeholders. There are, however, no suggestions for how stakeholder identification, priority, and accountability can be accomplished. This study is grounded in the proposition that stakeholder prioritization is a critical communication process in efforts to plan and to implement inter-organizational information integration system (IOIS) change initiatives. A case study of the planning processes of a prominent regional justice IOIS program, the Criminal Research and Investigation System (CRIS), serves as the data source for this dissertation.

Overall, the results confirm that stakeholder considerations play a primary role in the trajectory of the planning processes and outcomes for implementing an IOIS. Elaborating earlier theoretical and empirical work on stakeholder prioritization, the findings illustrate the complexity of identifying, agreeing upon, and taking into account the needs of salient stakeholders. The data also confirm that stakeholders can be assessed for needed prioritization by power, legitimacy, and urgency. The combination of these characteristics is explained with more detail and used to illustrate the discrepancies between whom implementers say matter and who is really prioritized in formal deliberations. Who or what really counts in change can become unwittingly relegated to the periphery. Identification of four stakeholder paradoxes and related dualities revolving around self-interest, representation, decision style, and voice shed light on the communicative dynamics associated with "being stuck" in planning change rather than moving forward toward the IOIS change goals. In general, the data reveal that throughout the history of the CRIS program, these dualities both enabled and constrained change. Overall, these findings show that stakeholder analysis that surveys decision making against agreed-upon stakeholder prioritization can help implementers overcome the complexity of managing stakeholders and associated paradoxes that arise in complex IOIS change.