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Personal Health Record (PHR) systems make possible to integrate data from different sources and circulate them within the illness care and management network. The new arrangements prefigure a redefinition of the relations among healthcare practitioners, patients, and caregivers. The purpose of this paper is to consider the role and the meanings attributed to information when a technical artifact enables new forms of communication within the healthcare management network.

The authors adopted a qualitative research design, conducting a pre-post analysis on a theoretical sample of patients and of a paediatrics department. The authors selected 12 patients (six females and six males) aged between four and 20 years old.

The patients were willing to act as “stewards of their own information” (Halamka et al., 2008), but they interpreted this role in terms of restricting access to their information, rather than facilitating its dissemination. In fact, the PHR was symbolized as an instrument to support personal diabetes management but the patients want to preserve their own competence and independent management on the information regarding their “Personal” diseases.

This work highlights two connotation of “Personal” information. The first is the dimension of the right to the privacy of information when it is believed that it may be used to pass judgement on the patient. The second connotation of “Personal” is the assertion by patients of their competence and autonomy in interpreting the information on the basis of personal knowledge about their diabetes.

This essay is based on material gathered by me while in East Africa. It would probably have been more valuable if I could have written in detail and critically on one or more of the subjects instead of covering so much ground. I am not really competent to do this; instead I am presenting what is really a list of sources for those who wish to explore further.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of the implementation process on the ERP’s success in the post-adoption stage, measured as system’s acceptance, reliability and utility perceived by users, inside the organizations.

The authors adopted a multiple case study research design. The data collected, provided by IT managers and 120 key-users from four companies, has been used to investigate the impact of the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation phases on selected constructs of the Task-Technology Fit (TTF) and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). The empirical evidences highlight a direct relation between the effectiveness of the implementation phases and the ERP’s success.

The research results emphasize the importance of the quality of the software, but especially the importance of the implementation phases’ management, which require technical and managerial ability of the team made up of people from the system integrator and the company’s key-users. Evidences suggest that the higher will be the organizational diffusion of an ERP implemented during a successful implementation project, the higher will be the perception of ERP success in the post-adoption stage. Moreover, the users’ perception of ERP quality will be maintained over time.

The research has some limits due to its exploratory nature and to the chosen research approach, so the results may lack generalizability; consequently future research will concern with enlargement of the sample that will allow a better generalization of the results.

This exploratory study suggest that companies’ managers should be aware that a correct methodology of implementation, strongly influenced by the team, impacts on the technology consistency and therefore, on the ERP system success. So an appropriate choice is to invest more in the creation and development of internal and external project team than in the ERP’s brand.

This paper fulfils an identified need to clarify the explicit relationship between the quality of implementation phases and the subsequent ERP success in the post-adoption stage measured in terms of users’ perception of information system quality.