تاثیر تعادل اداره امور بر موفقیت پروژه برنامه ریزی منابع سازمانی (ERP)

As the ERP adopter and ERP consultancy combine their efforts and resources to achieve mutually desirable goals, the problem of governance, which has been mainly identified as an intrafirm problem, is recognized to be an interfirm problem. To investigate the relationship between various governance mechanisms and their capacity to relieve project hazards, we propose a covariance model of ERP governance. The constructed model analyzes the complementary contributions of different governance mechanisms on ERP project success. Four governance mechanisms are studied, including explicit contracts, implicit contracts, reputation, and trust. This study holds that the virtue of one mechanism will grow into the gap of another, forming an equilibrium of governance structure. Then, the governance equilibrium plays a mediating role between ERP project hazards and ERP project success. Empirical analysis based on 122 ERP implementation projects shows a significantly positive relationship between governance equilibrium and ERP project success. Further, in support of transaction cost theory (TCT), the results indicate that governance equilibrium tends to be aligned with exchange hazards, specifically those associated with specialized investments and uncertainty. The empirical evidence suggests that governance equilibrium, when treated as a multidimensional construct, can provide a holistic representation of complex interfirm governance and allow researchers to match broad predictors with broad outcomes, leading to greater explanatory power of governance mechanisms on ERP project success. Implications, limitations, and future research directions of the study are discussed.

Since a full adoption of ERP system spans all functional silos, the hazards of implementation uncertainty are usually salient. Many firms thus bring outside help to accomplish the ERP implementation effort. Unfortunately, implementation difficulties still make approximately 90% of ERP projects late or over budget, encounter many technical problems, or fail to realize expected benefits. In order to relieve the ERP project hazards, business managers should attend to the governance issues in an ERP project so as to increase the likelihood of project success. Governance is a recurrent theme in economic and social systems. Traditionally, the literature on governance has paid much attention to identifying the most efficient mode of isolated governance within a particular context. Studies applying the reductionist approach have focused mainly on how a single governance mechanism affects transaction efficiency (e.g., Ref. [9]) and/or how pairs of governance mechanisms (formal vs. social) explain performance in a bivariate view (e.g., Refs. [10] and [43]). Such reductionism treats the anatomy of interfirm governance as being decomposable into components that can be examined independently, and the knowledge gained from each component can then be aggregated to understand the overall interfirm cooperation. However, a complicated ERP project is embedded in a complex matrix of economic, social, and cultural dimensions. Any reductionist or bivariate analysis therefore is likely to result in internal inconsistency among multiple pairwise contingencies [54], and the managerial implications of each contingency are unlikely to be the same and often in conflict [13]. For example, an implicit agreement by itself may not lead to more cost-efficient cooperation. The same may also hold true for the reputation mechanism. However, if an interfirm relationship relies on both mechanisms, the mechanisms may function as complements, thus reinforcing each other [27].

This study makes a valuable contribution to both the ERP and TCT literatures by focusing directly on the presence of governance equilibrium. In the orthodox economic research, governance is often captured as a single or a small collection of mechanisms that affect transaction costs separately. Such formulations are appealing for their simplicity in research administration and analysis. However, because of the interdependence of governance mechanisms, many interactions among these mechanisms could be hidden in observation (as discussed in Section 2.3). The importance of each governance mechanism may vary depending on the situation. For this reason, we extend the reductionist analysis by exploring the relationships among explicit contracts, implicit contracts, reputation, and trust from a more complete and adaptive perspective, showing how they mitigate project hazards to increase the likelihood of ERP project success. The main premise of this paper is that treating governance equilibrium as a multidimensional construct can provide a more holistic representation of complex interfirm interactions, allowing researchers to match broad predictors with broad outcomes and increasing explained variances. Our findings confirm the contention that governance equilibrium is multidimensional. If this is indeed the case, we can understand why different ERP adopters who hire the same consultancy and are offered the same ERP service provisions failed to achieve similar implementation outcomes. Our results also show that an ERP adopter needs more complete governance when it is locked into a relationship because of idiosyncratic investments. Holistic governance is also necessarily prominent in cases where perfect monitoring and evaluation of consultancy performance are impossible. Several implications can be derived from our findings.