Erica L. Wagner

Networks, negotiations, and new times: the implementation of enterprise resource planning into an academic administration☆

Higher education is a sector entering an era of IT-enabled modernization in which it may have to cope with an influx of unfamiliar corporate concepts and practices. This paper analyzes one of the first Enterprise Resource Planning implementation projects within the academic administration of an Ivy League university. We contribute to existing qualitative literature in information systems by developing the theme of temporality within actor–network theory to support our analysis. This enables us to extend process-oriented ERP research by focusing on the identification of temporal zones and creation of durable work times designed to re-order priorities between competing visions for the future of higher education. We analyze detailed negotiations during periods of controversy to reveal how standard work practices come to be created and recreated. We consider how the ERP that emerges is affected by progressive trials of strength during the project and analyze the achievement of order as an on-going process. Our findings highlight the distinctive contribution that a ‘temporal turn’ can bring to longitudinal research studies by providing insight into the technical agency of ERP packages and how its temporal inscriptions shaped the emergence of a socio-technical information system. This reordered organizational work life and created a hybrid temporality that still needs to be negotiated into the working rhythms of the University’s actors.

‘Best’ for whom?: the tension between ‘best practice’ ERP packages and diverse epistemic cultures in a university context

The idea that so-called ‘best’ business practices can be transferred to organizations when they purchase enterprise resource planning (ERP) software packages is a major selling point of these packages. Yet recent research has illustrated a gap between the espoused theory of a best practice solution and the theory-in-use experienced by those who install software with such a design. As researchers begin to examine the difficult process by which organizations recast the best practices model handed down to them by consultancies and software vendors in an effort to make the software ‘work for them’ in practice, it is equally important that we begin to understand the reasons that such a gap exists. To this end, we analyze the strategic partnership between a multinational software vendor and a university who together designed a ‘best practice’ ERP package for the higher education industry. Through the theoretical lens of ‘epistemic cultures’ we argue that in organizational contexts made up of more than one epistemic culture, the use of a best practice model will be problematic because, by definition, the model mandates one epistemological position through the software design. This is counter to a universitys loosely coupled organizational form.

The Creation Of ‘Best Practice’ Software: Myth, Reality And Ethics

The notion of best practice is a foundational concept for vendors of Enterprise Resource Planning systems who use it to support a claim to provide tried and tested, ‘best of breed’ process models. This study illustrates how a best practice ERP system was actually created. The product resulted from a socio-political process involving negotiations amongst a small group of interests in a particular context. This process is illuminated through the presentation of an intensive case study in which we follow the creation of the ERP product destined to be marketed as a best practice solution for higher education institutions. We focus on the design of an ERP-based grants management system to highlight the role of software in shaping operations and strategy at both a firm and industry level. The design of IT shapes the boundaries of organizational knowledge and decision-making by classifying work practices and translating them into the software. The focus of our investigation is the process by which a small group of powerful actors came to define the ‘best practice’ for an industry. Findings reveal the politics involved in constructing, marketing and disseminating best practice claims. Using theoretical concepts from Science and Technology Studies literature, we illuminate how the design of the ERP product changed the nature of work, and how later such practices were locally refuted and amended, despite the original product continuing to be sold by the software vendor. The ethics of such ‘best practice’ claims are questioned.

Moving beyond user participation to achieve successful IS design

A call for user engagement cannot be scheduled at a specific point in the software development process. Valuable user input comes in waves throughout the project and developers would do best to listen and learn.

Understanding the Contextual Influences on Enterprise System Design, Implementation, Use and Evaluation

Understanding the contextual influences on enterprise system design, implementation, use and evaluation

Integration in ERP Environments: Rhetoric, Realities and Organisational Possibilities

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) packages are said to enable integration when the standard inscription is adhered to through software configuration. A social shaping perspective expands conceptualisations of ERP packages, enabling a view of them as configurational technologies. Thus, ERP integration is opened up and the integration through standardisation thesis is challenged.

Exposing Best Practices Through Narrative: The ERP Example

The phrase best practice has entered into common parlance in contemporary business discourse, yet recent research has shown that the construction of industry standards and their inscription into software packages is not straightforward. Organizations increasingly find they are bound to accept project outcomes that have emerged as a consequence of negotiations between an installed base of consultancy or software vendor solutions and local context. We adopt a narrative approach to analyze the negotiation of a best practice design during the implementation of an ERP system. Having adopted the position that the IT artifact is part of an ensemble of networked agencies that shift over time, we then use an actor-network perspective to trace the different sources, agencies, and affects of inscription during the ERP project. Doing so highlights the politics involved in localizing an IT artifact and the issues raised when software vendors and sector specific partners collaborate with the intention of manufacturing a commercially viable ERP package intended to represent the embodiment of best practice. The paper contributes to IS research discourse by demonstrating the application of narrative analysis in longitudinal interpretive field studies.

Felt quality of sociomaterial relations: Introducing emotions into sociomaterial theorizing

Sociomateriality, in helping to overcome the longstanding dualism between the social and the technical, has become an increasingly popular theoretical perspective in Information Systems (IS) research. However, while recognizing the usefulness of sociomaterial theorizing, we contend that it also inadvertently perpetuates other kinds of dualisms-particularly that of objectivism-subjectivism and cognition-emotion. We argue that sociomaterialitys current inability to express what it feels like to be a human agent, and the inadvertent perpetuation of the cognitive-emotional dualism, is problematic in terms of the limited practical insights these perspectives generate. To address this limitation, we propose and illustrate two different approaches for including emotions in sociomaterial theorizing. By proposing two approaches for the inclusion of emotions into applications of sociomateriality in IS research (one founded on critical realism, and the other on agential realism), we provide researchers with the conceptual tools to generate richer practical and theoretical insights.

Enterprise Systems Projects: The Role of Liminal Space in Enterprise Systems Implementation

We investigate information systems (IS) projects as a liminal space ‘betwixt and between’ the status quo and the new environment, using a case study of the implementation of an enterprise system (ES). This liminal space provides a stabilizing platform whereupon the project team can develop new and potentially transformative IS. However, after a project team has completed its initial IS design for roll-out, this liminal space must be bridged to incorporate process-generated learning and new systems back into the organizational working environment. We demonstrate how this bridging involves negotiations that attempt to reconcile divergent perspectives by adopting a conciliatory or peacemaking attitude. As such, our analysis focuses on the IS project as a multi-phased process that includes the creation of a liminal space for the project team during development and on the negotiations that ensure the ES becomes a working IS in the post-implementation environment.

Special Issue. Part II: understanding the contextual influences on enterprise system design, implementation, use and evaluation

The ways in which enterprise systems (ES) influence and are influenced by the context of adoption, including influences at the individual, group, organizational and societal levels were investigate ...