📖 ABSTRACT/OVERVIEW
Nigerian government ICT project failures are a recurring and costly phenomenon, yet existing explanatory frameworks drawn from project management and systems engineering inadequately capture the emergent, adaptive, and non-linear dynamics that characterise large-scale public sector technology ecosystems. This dissertation applies complexity theory to analyse software ecosystem failures in Nigerian government ICT projects, developing a novel theoretical explanation grounded in Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) science. A retrospective multiple-case study examines five large-scale government ICT project failures across the North Central (IFMIS implementation), South West (LASG e-government portal), South South (NDDC digital registry), South East (ENUGU e-tax system), and North West (Kano BRT management system) zones, using documentary analysis, archival records, and 35 key informant interviews with project stakeholders. CAS concepts including emergence, self-organisation, feedback loops, and phase transitions are applied to reconstruct failure narratives beyond conventional cost-schedule-scope explanations. The analysis yields four original CAS-grounded failure archetypes: Entropy Cascade, Feedback Suppression, Agent Misalignment, and Edge-of-Chaos Stagnation, each describing a distinct dynamic pathway to project collapse. A Complexity-Informed ICT Governance (CIIG) model is developed from these archetypes, providing prescriptive guidance for government technology project design and oversight. The dissertation makes original theoretical contributions to software engineering governance literature and to Nigerian public administration scholarship. Keywords: complexity theory, government ICT, software ecosystem, Nigeria, project failure
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