یک طبقه بندی از بازیکنان و فعالیت های در سراسر چرخه عمر پروژه ERP

An important problem in probabilistic description is to understand who are the key players, which activities associated with enterprise system implementations are important, and when their effect is most prevalent across the IT development stages. Using an information theory approach, we analyze the fit between their importance, as noted in the current literature, and the experiences reported by a cross-section of 116 organizations that completed an enterprise system implementation experience. Our results suggest that the early literature- and case-based research on enterprise systems does not take into account the importance of several key variables. These findings provide guidance to managers on how best to utilize their limited resources by employing such factors at the stage in the project’s life cycle when they will have the greatest impact.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have been considered an important development in the corporate use of information technology in the 1990s, enhancing organizational cross-functional efficiency and effectiveness through the seamless integration of all the information flowing through a company [23]. Major business drivers behind ERP implementations are: improving productivity, providing competitive advantage, and satisfying customer demands. With ERP penetration at 67%, the ERP market is the largest segment of a company’s applications budget (34%) and is expected to remain so through 2004 [80]. ERP systems are complex pieces of software. Consequently, many such implementations have been difficult, lengthy and over budget, were terminated before completion, and failed to achieve their business objectives even a year after implementation [64]. The significance and risks of ERP make it essential that organizations focus on ways to improve ERP implementation. Combining the factors view of implementation with a process perspective, we have examined a comprehensive framework that allows us to investigate the issues that should dominate each implementation stage. Specifically, we explored the following important questions: • Which key players and activities are playing a pivotal role in an organization’s experience with the ERP implementation? • At which stage of the implementation process is it critical for an organization to introduce a key player or activity in order to derive major benefits? Based on an extensive review of the practitioner and research literature we classified a number of critical success factors using the Markus and Tanis [56] framework into key players and typical activities. We also examined the importance of each player and activity using Cooper and Zmud’s [21] six-stage model of IT implementation to determine when key players and activities need to be given higher priority than others. We then used an information theoretic approach to analyze the information discrepancy between the hypothesized literature-based importance of each player and activity across stages and their actual importance derived from a survey of medium to large organizations that completed their ERP implementation.

The study adopted a temporal perspective on critical success factors in ERP implementations and investi- gated the importance of key players and activities across the enterprise system life cycle. As such, its contribution includes both theory advancement and insights to guide practice in implementing enterprise systems. A particular contribution is its focus beyond the adoption and acceptance stages of implementation to include both pre- and post-implementation beha- vior. This appears to be particularly important for ERP systems.