M. Lynne Markus

Learning from adopters' experiences with ERP: problems encountered and success achieved

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) packages touch many aspects of a companys internal and external operations. Consequently, successful deployment and use of ERP systems are critical to organizational performance and survival. This paper presents the results of a study of the problems and outcomes in ERP projects which was conducted under the sponsorship of an ERP systems vendor. Two basic research questions were addressed. First, how successful are companies at different points in time in their ERP experiences and how are different measures of success related? (That is, can early success be followed by failure and vice versa?) Second, what problems do ERP adopters encounter as they implement and deploy ERP and how are these problems related to outcomes? The findings showed that the success of ERP systems depends on when it is measured and that success at one point in time may only be loosely related to success at another point in time. Companies experience problems at all phases of the ERP system life cycle and many of the problems experienced in later phases originated earlier but remained unnoticed or uncorrected. These findings suggest that researchers and companies will do well to adopt broad definitions and multiple measures of success and pay particular attention to the early identification and correction of problems.

Technochange management: using IT to drive organizational change

Using IT in ways that can trigger major organizational changes creates high-risk, potentially high-re ward, situations that I call technochange (for technology-driven organizational change). Technochange differs from typical IT projects and from typical organizational change programs and therefore requires a different approach. One major risk in technochange—that people will not use information technology and related work practices—is not thoroughly addressed by the discipline of IT project management, which focuses on project cost, project schedule, and solution functionality. Organizational change management approaches are also generally not effective on their own, because they take as a given the IT “solutions” developed by a technical team. Consequently, the potential for the IT “solution” to be misaligned with important organizational characteristics, such as culture or incentives, is great.Merely combining IT project management and organizational change management approaches does not produce the best results, for two reasons. First, the additive approach does not effectively address the many failure-threatening problems that can arise over the lengthy sequential process of the typical technochange lifecycle. Second, the additive approach is not structured to produce the characteristics of a good technochange solution: a complete intervention consisting of IT and complementary organizational changes, an implementable solution with minimal misfits with the existing organization, and an organization primed to appropriate the potential benefits of the technochange solution. With hard work and care, the combined IT project management plus organizational change approach can be made to work. However, an iterative, incremental approach to implementing technochange can be a better strategy in many situations. The essential characteristic of the technochange prototyping approach is that each phase involves both new IT functionality and related organizational changes, such as redesigned business processes, new performance metrics, and training.

Enterprise resource planning: multisite ERP implementations

H istorically, ERP systems evolved from MRP II systems, which are designed to manage a production facility’s orders, production plans, and inventories. ERP systems integrate inventory data with financial, sales, and human resources data, allowing organizations to price their products, produce financial statements, and manage the resources of people, materials, and money. Implementing ERP systems can be quite straightforward when organizations are simply structured and operate in one or a few locations. But when organizations are structurally complex and geographically dispersed, implementing ERP systems involves difficult, possibly unique, technical and managerial choices and challenges. The complexities of what are often called “multisite” ERP implementations are discussed here. Like all computer-based information systems, multisite ERP implementations can be analyzed in terms of levels or layers (logical versus physical, hardware versus software). At each level there are different choices to make and different criteria for evaluating the alternatives. However, the layers are interdependent: Choices at one level may limit the available choices or affect the performance of the system at another level. Therefore, organizations are generally advised to start planning multisite ERP implementations at the strategic level before proceeding to the technical (software and hardware) levels. In practice, however, the sheer size and scale of such implementations may encourage organizations to tackle the layers MULTISITE ERP IMPLEMENTATIONS

Industry-wide information systems standardization as collective action: the case of the U.S. residential mortgage industry

Vertical information systems (VIS) standards are technical specifications designed to promote coordination among the organizations within (or across) vertical industry sectors. Examples include the bar code, electronic data interchange (EDI) standards, and RosettaNet business process standards in the electronics industry. This contribution examines VIS standardization through the lens of collective action theory, applied in the literature to information technology product standardization, but not yet to VIS standardization, which is led by heterogeneous groups of user organizations rather than by IT vendors. Through an intensive case analysis of VIS standardization in the U.S. residential mortgage industry, VIS standardization success is shown to be as problematic as IT product standardization success, but for different reasons. VIS standardization involves two linked collective action dilemmas-standards development and standards diffusion- with different characteristics, such that a solution to the first may fail to resolve the second. Whereas prior theoretical and empirical research shows that IT product standardization efforts tend to splinter into rival factions that compete through standards wars in the marketplace, successful VIS standards consortia must encompass heterogeneous groups of user organizations and IT vendors without fragmenting. Some tactics successfully used to solve the collective action dilemma of VIS standardization (e.g., governance mechanisms and policies about intellectual property protection) are also used by IT product standardization efforts, but some are different, and successful VIS standardization requires a package of solutions tailored to fit and jointly resolve the specific dilemmas of particular VIS standards initiatives.

PRECONDITIONS FOR BPR SUCCESS And How to Prevent Failures

Abstract What organizational conditions set the stage for business process reengineering success or failure? Line managers and IS executives can assess their organizations against the positive and negative preconditions identified in this article.

The poverty of media richness theory

How and why people choose which communication medium to use is an important issue for both behavioral researchers and software product developers. Little is yet known about how and why people in organizations choose amongnewmedia like electronic mail and voice mail, although the availability and use of new media are increasing dramatically. Media richness theory (MRT) is the most prominent, if contested, theory of media choice. It is concerned with identifying the most appropriate medium in terms of “medium richness” for communication situations characterized by equivocality and uncertainty. From this theory, we derived hypotheses about how and why individuals will choose between electronic mail and voice mail and tested them among users of both media in the corporate headquarters of a large company. The data are analysed using both quantitative and qualitative techniques. The results fail to support MRT, but they do support alternative explanations of peoples media choice behavior. While the concept of media richness is too poor to explain the richness of peoples media use behavior, our behavioral findings and explanations should prove useful to those building the next generation of integrated multimedia communication tools.

Electronic marketplaces and price transparency: strategy, information technology, and success

Electronic marketplaces (EMPs) are widely assumed to increase price transparency and hence lower product prices. Results of empirical studies have been mixed, with several studies showing that product prices have not decreased and others showing that prices have increased in some cases. One explanation is that sellers prefer not to join EMPs with high price transparency, leading highly price transparent EMPs to fail. Therefore, in order to be successful, EMPs might be expected to avoid high price transparency. But that strategy creates a catch-22 for EMPs on the buy side: Why would buyers want to join EMPs in the absence of price transparency and the benefit of lower prices? We argue that successful EMPs must provide compensatory benefits for sellers in the case of high price transparency and for buyers in the case of low price transparency. To understand how EMPs could succeed, regardless of price transparency, we examined the relationships among EMP strategy, price transparency, and performance by analyzing all 19 EMPs that compete by selling a broad range of standard electronics components. We found that all EMPs pursuing a low cost strategy had high price transparency and performed poorly. All EMPs that performed well pursued strategies of differentiation, but, interestingly, not all successful EMPs avoided price transparency: Some EMPs succeeded despite enabling high price transparency. We therefore examined two differentiated EMPs in greater depth-one with high price transparency, the other with low price transparency-to show how they achieved strategic alignment of activities and resources and provided compensatory benefits for their customers.

Structural Influences on Global E-Commerce Activity

An important line of research on global information management examines the effects of national culture on IT development, operations, management and use. This paper argues that global information management researchers should not lose sight of structural conditions related to business-to-business and business-to-consumer e-commerce activity. Structural conditions are physical, social and economic arrangements that shape e-commerce business models and influence individual and organizational use of the Internet. Examples include geography (which affects the physical distribution of goods purchased online), space (which influences the choice of access technology for e-commerce) and financial infrastructure (which is related to credit card use). Structural conditions differ from country to country—and even from location to location within country, but they are not necessarily related to dimensions of natural culture. Therefore, valid explanations of global differences in e-commerce activity require a careful assessment of relevant structural factors.

Technology-Shaping Effects of E-Collaboration Technologies: Bugs and Features

Recently, Orlikowski and Iacono (2001) called for increased theorizing of the information technology (IT) artifact. Both authors have made important contributions to what they refer to as the “ensemble†view of technology. By contrast, the “tool†view has remained noticeably underdeveloped. The goal of this essay is to begin articulating such a tool view for research on e-collaboration technologies. Referred to here as “the technology-shaping perspective,†this view eschews technological determinism but nevertheless looks for broad patterns of probabilistic effects that can be attributed to technology’s material features. In brief, the technology-shaping perspective holds that technologies pose problems for users who want to use them to accomplish particular goals; the solutions users create for those problems during recurrent use may exhibit certain regularities across different contexts. Consequently, small differences in the features of apparently similar tools could be associated with big differences in usage patterns and social outcomes. The claim is that conducting future research on a technology-shaping agenda could yield cumulative results that are less “disappointing†than many scholars find group decision support systems (GSS) research, the largest single body of work on e-collaboration technologies.

Adoption and impact of collaboration electronic marketplaces

This paper reviews and assesses several theoretical perspectives on one type of business-to-business electronic marketplace—collaboration marketplaces. Whereas transaction-oriented marketplaces are characterized by catalogs, auctions or exchanges, and support for negotiated pricing, collaboration marketplaces are characterized by planning capabilities such as continuous planning, forecasting, and replenishment or product life-cycle management. Collaboration marketplaces have different benefits than transaction-oriented marketplaces and different adoption considerations. Therefore, theoretical frameworks such as transaction cost theory, which apply quite well to transaction-oriented marketplaces, provide only a partial explanation of collaboration marketplace adoption. We compare alternative theoretical perspectives on collaboration marketplaces and discuss their implications for future research.