Rethinking Administrative Software Procurement in Medium-Sized Universities: A Socio-Technical Case Study of Embedded In-House Development

Universities increasingly rely on administrative information systems that combine proprietary third-party software, legacy applications, and in-house tools adapted over time to changing regulatory requirements. Such changes are frequent, cumulative, and cross-cutting, and may contribute to fragmented socio-technical systems characterised by limited interoperability, inconsistent data, weak feedback mechanisms, and increased administrative burden. This paper examines these dynamics through a practice-based single-case study at a medium-sized European university. The case focuses on the annual preparation of the institutional teaching plan, a regulation-intensive process that determines teaching assignments, workload calculations, staffing needs, contracts, leave management, and compliance with applicable constraints. It analyses a targeted intervention involving the development and deployment of an in-house system designed to integrate previously dispersed data, encode regulatory constraints explicitly, support iterative user feedback, and enable rapid adaptation to institutional requirements. In the subsequent planning cycle, the process finished earlier and showed improved data consistency, more systematic regulatory verification, and greater staffing readiness. The paper shows how software architecture, embedded institutional knowledge, managerial coordination, and short feedback cycles jointly altered the governance conditions of a complex administrative process. Its contribution is to conceptualise administrative software procurement and development as a systems governance problem rather than merely a technical or purchasing decision.