Gary Klein

Improving enterprise resource planning (ERP) fit to organizational process through knowledge transfer

Critical to enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation is the fit between the system and the processes in an organization. Knowledge about the ERP system must flow from those implementing the system and those responsible once in production. Effective knowledge transfer is assisted by the absorptive capacity of the learner and the competence of the knowledge holder, as reflected in the client and consultant relationship of this study. A model of transfer is composed from existing theories of learning to explain the roles played by the client through absorptive capacity and the consultant through competence. Survey data of CIOs in Taiwan confirm that transfer is improved with higher levels of capacity and competence, while the transfer process leads to a better fit between ERP systems and organizational processes. Management needs to foster the build-up of their internal knowledge stocks in order to stimulate the flow of knowledge transfer.

Group cohesion in organizational innovation: An empirical examination of ERP implementation

Enterprise Resource Planning systems present unique difficulties in implementation in that they typically involve changes to the entire organization and are a novel application for the organization. These characteristics add to the importance of making groups more cohesive in their goals, commitment, and ability to work toward completion of the new system project. Such cohesiveness is built partly through the willingness of the team members to participate and commitment to learning the new system. To determine if these relationships hold, a survey of users and managers in Taiwan was conducted to test a model derived from social capital theory. The data support the positive relationships between group cohesion and both willingness to participate and commitment to learning. Group cohesion is likewise positively related to meeting management goals. Resources within an organization should support the climate of learning and the building of team participation.

Discrepancies between desired and perceived measures of performance of IS professionals: Views of the IS professionals themselves and the users

Evaluation of IS professionals is difficult. Measures are seldom fully defined and suffer from the inability of a user to consider differences between expectations and perceptions of performance. In addition, expected levels of performance and perceived levels of performance depend on the satisfaction of each group of stakeholders. Discrepancy theory leads one to expect that satisfaction is highest when performance matches expectations. To explore this gap in different groups, a sample of users and a matched sample of IS professionals was investigated in order to determine the relationship between the performance gap and satisfaction with the system on the part of the users and careers on the part of the IS professionals. Larger gaps were found to be associated with poor satisfaction in both samples. Additionally, each group had a different set of expectations, indicating that the measures did not represent the same expectation or meanings to different stakeholders. Thus, management should strive to promote uniform understanding of the measures employed in IS professional performance evaluation by all stakeholders and manage expectations according to the metrics selected.

Lack of Skill Risks to Organizational Technology Learning and Software Project Performance

To improve the performance of software projects, a number of practices are encouraged that serve to control certain risks in the development process, including a lack of essential skills and knowledge related to the application domain and system development process. A potential mediating variable between the lack of skill risk and project performance is the ability of an organization to acquire the essential domain knowledge and technology skills through learning, specifically organizational technology learning. However, the same lack of knowledge that hinders good project performance may also inhibit learning. This study examines the relationship between information system personnel skills and domain knowledge, organizational technology learning, and software project performance with a sample of professional software developers. Indications are that the relationship between information systems IS personnel skills and project performance is partially mediated by organizational technology learning.

Relationship of Skill Expectation Gap Between IS Employees and Their Managers with User Satisfaction

The skills held by information system professionals clearly impact the outcome of a project. However, the perceptions of just what skills are expected of information systems IS employees have not been found to be a reliable predictor of eventual success in the literature. Though relationships to success have been identified, the results broadly reported in the literature are often ambiguous or conflicting, presenting difficulties in developing predictive models of success. We examine the perceptions of IS managers and IS employees for technology management, interpersonal, and business skills to determine if their perceptions can serve to predict user satisfaction. Simple gap measures are dismissed as inadequate because weights on the individual expectations are not equal. Exploratory results from polynomial regression models indicate that the problems in defining a predictive model extend beyond the weighting difficulties, as results differ by each skill type. Compound this with inherent problems in the selection of a success measure, and we only begin to understand the complexities in the relationships that may be required in an adequate predictive model relating skills to success.