Reasons behind ERP package adoption: a diffusion of innovations perspective

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) packages have been widely adopted and it is becoming clear that this is driven by multiple rationales that may be simultaneously at odds and complimentary. In this paper, we aim to develop a greater understanding of these rationales by taking ERP packages to be innovations and analysing their adoption with reference to the theory of diffusion of innovations. In particular, we consider the attributes of ERP packages that may affect their adoption such as relative advantage, compatibility, complexiblity, trialability and observability. We argue that users’ perceptions of these attributes are not always accurate and these ’misconceptions’ can further explain reasons for ERP adoption or rejection. Although our analysis aims to provide rich insights into the adoption of ERP packages, the results of the study are arguably of further interest to the more general study of packaged software and the more established literature on custom development

What Drives Waves in Information Systems: The Organizing Vision Perspective

Waves of fashionable ideas shape the practice and research of information systems (IS). What forces drive idea waves in IS? This research takes the first step to empirically study IS idea waves in inter-organizational com- munities through the lens of organizing visions. Introduced by Swanson and Ramiller (1997), an organizing vision is a focal community idea for applying information technologies in organizations. Each organizing vision is produced and sustained through a discourse whose popularity often runs a wave-like lifecycle. By studying the discourse promoting enterprise resource planning (ERP), I examine the influence of four forces on the upswing phase of an organizing vision discourse wave: (1) a business problematic highlighted by discourse, (2) the early market for an IS innovation, (3) core technologies, and (4) the collapse of old organizing visions in a problem domain. A better understanding of the relationship between key forces and organizing vision development will help both practitioners and researchers monitor and relate to the exciting waves in our field

The Organizational Impact of Information Technology Fashion

This study examines some of the important organizational consequences of the fashion phenomenon in information technology. An IT fashion is an information technology transitorily collectively believed as new, efficient, and at the forefront of practice. Using data collected from published discourse and annual corporate IT budgets, I have found that companies associated with IT fashions did not have higher performance, but they had better reputation and higher executive compensation in the near term. Companies investing in fashionable IT had lower performance in a short term, but improved their performance later. These findings are expected to add valuable insights to IT innovation research more broadly. The study will also help managers balance between the pressure for performance and the need for social approval when they confront whatever is hottest in IT

Going Beyond the Dominant Paradigm for Information Technology Innovation Research: Emerging Concepts and Methods

Research on information technology (IT) innovation is concerned with identifying the factors that facilitate or hinder the adoption and diffusion of new IT-based processes or products. Most of this research has been conducted within the confines of a dominant paradigm wherein innovations are assumed to be beneficial, and organizations that have greater innovation-related needs and abilities are expected to exhibit a greater amount of innovative activity. This essay suggests that the dominant paradigm may be reaching the point of diminishing returns as a framework for supporting ground-breaking research, and urges researchers to adopt a more innovative approach to the study of IT innovation itself. Toward this end, I present seven opportunities for conducting new kinds of research that go beyond the dominant paradigm

Convergence And Mobility– Just Another Fad Or Fashion? A Systems-Theoretical Analysis

The notion of convergence has gained a lot of interest in the past few years in both theory and practice. On one hand, observers see convergence as a meaningless technology fad. Other observers, on the other hand consider convergence to be an important factor for the design of new mobile information infrastructures and services. This paper investigates these contradictory discourses by applying Luhmann’s Systems Theory to analyse the use of the notion of convergence in business press databases and professional social network profiles in UK mobile telecommunications. The data corpus contains 3,008 press articles from 1979-2008 on mobile convergence collected from Reuters Factiva database and 1,007 profiles from UK telecommunications professionals from LinkedIn. The analysis of 30 years of convergence articles shows that convergence cannot be regarded as a simple management fad. Convergence in the context of mobility is well established in the UK since 1987 and is part of the self-perception of many practitioners. However, the findings suggest that convergence does have characteristics of a fashion. These characteristics that make it appear to be a fashion are based on its systemic function of reducing differences

Management consulting.

Including a lengthy, comprehensive introduction, this important collection brings together some of the most influential papers that have contributed to our understanding of management consultancy work. The two-volume set encompasses the breadth of conceptual and empirical perspectives and explores those key ideas that have helped to advance our knowledge of this intriguing area. The volumes are divided into a series of thematic sections, affording the reader easy access to a great resource of information. Professors Clark and Avakian have written an original introduction which provides a comprehensive overview of the literature

Community Learning in Information Technology Fashion

In their striving to learn about information technology innovations, organizations draw on knowledge resources available in the diverse organizational communities that converge around those innovations. But even as such organizations learn about an innovation, so too does the larger community. Community learning takes place as its members reflect upon their learning and contribute their experiences, observations, and insights to the community’s on-going innovation discourse. Community learning and organizational learning thus build upon one another in a reciprocal process, or cycle, over time, as the stock of interpretations, adoption rationales, implementation strategies, and utilization patterns is expanded and refined. Relative to this overall cycle, we explore the neglected aspect that concerns how community learning draws on organizational learning. Analyzing the community discourse on enterprise resource planning (ERP) over the past 14 years, we found that different types of organizational actors played different roles, at different times, in contributing different types of knowledge to the discourse. Research analysts and technology vendors took leadership early on in articulating the know-what (conceptualization and interpretation) and know-why (justification) for ERP. Later on, adopters came to dominate the discourse through contributions of know-how (capacitation). We situate these observations in a larger model of the learning cycle, and outline a number of areas for future research on the crucial interactions between organizational and community learning in IT innovation

Research Directions in Information Systems: Toward an Institutional Ecology

This essay identifies three characteristic problems in how the Information Systems field sets its research directions. First is the propensity of our field to create research agendas modeled after the transitory infatuations that industry has with certain popular topics in IT-related innovation. The second problem is our field\u27s inclination to develop insular sub-communities that consume resources on behalf of research programs that are of limited theoretical and practical interest. A third problem is noted from time to time by our partners in industry: We sometimes neglect topics that are of practical interest to them. This paper argues that these seemingly diverse phenomena can be brought under a common umbrella by examining how the shaping of research agendas depends on forces in our field\u27s larger institutional milieu. Specifically, we suggest that the field\u27s research directions constitute responses to institutionally constituted market forces that arise both within academia and in the larger economy and society. Furthermore, we propose that the substance of the discourse associated with any particular research stream is dictated by the workings of these forces, in ways our community has yet to fully understand. We make four proposals for reflexive inquiry that we believe will advance this understanding and ultimately help to foster research that better serves both theory and practice, while being less subject to the whims of industry fashion

Integrating information and knowledge for enterprise innovation

It has widely been accepted that enterprise integration, can be a source of socio-technical and cultural problems within organisations wishing to provide a focussed end-to-end business service. This can cause possible “straitjacketing” of business process architectures, thus suppressing responsive business re-engineering and competitive advantage for some companies. Accordingly, the current typology and emergent forms of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technologies are set in the context of understanding information and knowledge integration philosophies. As such, key influences and trends in emerging IS integration choices, for end-to-end, cost-effective and flexible knowledge integration, are examined. As touch points across and outside organisations proliferate, via work-flow and relationship management-driven value innovation, aspects of knowledge refinement and knowledge integration pose challenges to maximising the potential of innovation and sustainable success, within enterprises. This is in terms of the increasing propensity for data fragmentation and the lack of effective information management, in the light of information overload. Furthermore, the nature of IS mediation which is inherent within decision making and workflow-based business processes, provides the basis for evaluation of the effects of information and knowledge integration. Hence, the authors propose a conceptual, holistic evaluation framework which encompasses these ideas. It is thus argued that such trends, and their implications regarding enterprise IS integration to engender sustainable competitive advantage, require fundamental re-thinking