از قابلیت های پویا تا پیشرفت های کسب و کار ERP فعال: اثر واسطه ای اجرای پروژه

This study explores whether an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation project mediates the relationship between dynamic pre-adoption capabilities and ERP-enabled business improvements. The results from our field survey of large ERP adopters in Austria suggest that the effects of the two out of three selected dynamic capabilities are dependent on the properties of the underlying organizational transformation project. While external information acquisition and IT governance capabilities are fully mediated by the performance of the ERP implementation project, decision making only directly impacts business capabilities. These results further our understanding about the role of the implementation project for ERP value creation and the different natures of capability relationships. We call for more research on co-presence conditions related to dynamic capabilities and IT transformation project performance.

Delivering improved IT enabled business capabilities through IT projects, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) adoptions, remains difficult and often unsuccessful. Many organizations seem to be unprepared to successfully plan and implement their IS/IT investment strategies, which usually have far-reaching consequences for how the entity is structured and conducts its business functions (Chen, 2001). Many ERP adoptions lead to partial successes or even abandonments prior to completion (Barker and Frolick, 2003 and Dawson and Owens, 2008). Only 13% of firms characterized their ERP adoption as meeting their expectations in improving business processes or delivering the expected business value, with more than 50% of firms rating their ERP adoption as unsatisfactory (Panorama Consulting Group, 2009). In view of such high failure rate, both researchers and managers continue to seek evidence on the organizational characteristics that can foster success of ERP adoption. Many prior studies have focused on the implementation project capabilities to improve how ERP is adopted in organizations. Specific IT project related criteria such as poor schedules, weak project management, and insufficient user involvement have been highlighted as critical failure factors in ERP implementations (Wong et al., 2005). Project management practices such as resource allocation, scope and risk management, and stakeholder involvement contribute to the success or failure of ERP adoptions (Chen et al., 2009). A less developed stream of research has highlighted the important role of organizational pre-adoption characteristics such as the planning capabilities including evaluation, decision making, budgeting, and strategy justification (Chen, 2001). These capacities are needed to recognize the value of new external information, to assimilate and apply it to generate business value (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990). However, it is still unclear how these and other pre-adoption capabilities directly and indirectly relate with improved IT enabled business capabilities. Against this backdrop, we seek to gain a better understanding of how IT enabled business capabilities are influenced by selected ERP pre-adoption capabilities. Our research model includes the implementation project as a mediator by which the pre-adoption capabilities affect business value development. We therefore link IS/IT benefit development with the business transformation inherent in ERP project and explore the project's mediating role as the central mechanism. By doing so, we directly address the concern that a direct-effect model exploring capabilities–performance hypothesis is overly simple and neglect the important transformation characteristics internal to the organization (Garrido-Moreno and Padilla-Meléndez, 2011). Theoretically, the management and IS literature provide a rich set of dynamic capabilities conceptions that enable organizations to improve business resources. Among these frameworks, our literature review offers a three-tier classification of “inside-out”, “outside-in”, and “spanning” capabilities (Wade and Hulland, 2004). For the fieldwork, we considered one capability from each of these domains by investigating the effects of external information acquisition as “outside-in” capability, decision making methods as “inside-out” capability, and IT governance as “spanning” capability. A quantitative empirical survey of 57 large Austrian ERP adopters serves as the primary data source. This study offers three key contributions to the ERP adoption literature. 1 The paper introduces three distinct dynamic pre-adoption capabilities (external information acquisition, IT decision making, IT governance) needed for ERP implementation and relates these with contemporary taxonomies of dynamic capabilities. 2 The paper suggests project management as a missing link in the sense of a dynamic transformation capability to fully exploit the dynamic pre-adoption capabilities. It thereby offers a better understanding of relationships between dynamic capabilities, which are often missing in prior research. 3 It highlights the positive effects of each considered dynamic capabilities on ERP enabled business capabilities based on primary survey data. Moreover, we show that the positive effects of external information acquisition and IT governance depend on the implementation project as a mediator in the sense of a generative mechanism.

The main contribution of this paper is to explicate the project process that potentially underlies the positive associ- ation between dynamic capabil ities and ERP enabled business capabilities. The findings show that the capacity for external information acquisition proje ct and IT governance mecha- nisms influence ERP enabled bu siness capabilities indirectly by the ERP implementation proj ect. Thus, the transformation project as mediator serves to clarify the relationships betweenthose two dynamic capabiliti es and ERP enabled business capabilities. In terms of decisio n making as the third capability in our model, we could not confirm the same mediational relationship. Decision making exhibits a direct positive association with ERP enabled b usiness capabilities, but no indirect relationship. Prior res earch, to our knowledge, has not yet provided the same analysis. The results advance our understanding about the nature and direction of these relation- ships, and we call for more research on co-presence conditions related to dynamic capabilities a nd transformation projects. Next, we will discuss these findi ngs and implications in more detail. The influence of externalinformation acquisition is dependent on the performance of the ERP adoption project (supporting H1 — indirect effects). Theoretically, this finding adds to our understanding about the critical ability of organizations to exploit external knowledge ( Cohen and Levinthal, 1990 )byimplying that external information gained at ERP project initiation should be assimilated and exploited by the ERP implementation project in order to generate ERP enabled business benefits. An effective ERP project seems to offer the transformative and exploitative learning and development processes that need to take place to utilize external information for business value delivery ( Lane et al., 2006 ). External information acquisition seems to be most regularly supported by vendor-driven information channels and consultants. This suggests the information acquisition capability for ERP may be a function of a dominating external gatekeeper's role that facilitates the transfer of external information into the ERP project and across the firm's internal boundaries. More research is needed to investigate the roles and capacities of project information integration and subsequent organizational absorptive capacities. Also in regard to our IT governance construct, the ERP project as transformation process seems to be a full mediator for achieving improved ERP enabled business capabilities (supporting H3 — indirect effects). This finding can be explained by previously identified linkages between governance and project success. Governance structures are essential for organizational learning in the context of technology sourcing ( Siriram and Snaddon, 2004 ), foster IT project success ( Bowen et al., 2007 ), and may help reduce conflicts and contradictions in ERP adoptions ( Besson and Rowe, 2001 ). The finding justifies more research into this connection. Future study may investigate the constituent IT governance elements ( Sohal and Fitzpatrick, 2002 ), and their properties and effect on IT program and project management ( Verhoef, 2007 ). Such a study improves understanding on how IT governance effectively connects with the management of IT driven business transformation projects.Analytical capacities reflected by decision making approaches are found to have a positive direct relationship with ERP enabled business capabilities only. They do not seem to be mediated by project performance (supporting Hypothesis 2 — direct effects only). In other words, the utiliz ation of decision making methods impacts business outcome regardle ss of the transformation project. We conceptualized decision making approaches in accordance to two broad streams of research in the area of decision making methods, where one focuses on mainstream financial accounting and economics, and the other on a wider inclusion of subjective and perceptual measures from behavioral science ( Davern and Wilkin, 2010 ). Higher project performance is associated with better devel- oped ERP enabled business capabilities (supporting Hypothesis 4 ). This hypothesis is a pre-condition for any mediation effects to occur. ERP project performance metrics present a picture of many successful ERP projects with high but not complete scope achievements, good levels of plan performance and good levels of achieved system related qualities. Consequently, we find that management practice wishing to leverage business value from IT should appreciate the value-generating mechanisms found in the IT project. Prior research noted that the relationship between dynamic capabilities and firm performance is mediated by capability development ( Wang and Ahmed, 2007 ). In our study, capability development is achieved by the ERP imple- mentation project when it comes to IT governance and external information acquisition capacities. The generative transformation mechanism of the IT project is needed to create value from these “ spanning ” and “ outside-in ” capabilities. Both capabilities tend to be less transparent and not easily replicated since they are based upon complex relationships between different stakeholders. In general, firms seem to require the co-presence of other complementary organizational resources ( Doherty and Terry, 2009 ) and different capabilities exhibit different natures of influences. This implies that the presence of a well developed program/project management capability is a necessary (but most likely not sufficient) condition for ERP enabled business valuegeneration. The well functioning communication systems needed for effective ERP projects ( Johannessena and Olsenb, 2011 ) could be one reason why they influence the effects of dynamic capabilities such as IT governance ( Huang et al., 2010 ). Finally, we need to acknowledge limitations of this study. A common problem in empirical quantitative research is reliability, in particular in relation to mediation models. We controlled reliability with the following measures. As a start we used random sampling procedures to ensure a good representation of all targets and applied pre-tests. The conducted non-response bias did not reveal any evidence of bias. We could not avoid the use of a mono method and single respondent strategy in the survey, which however is common in many studies of similar designs (e.g. Fink and Neumann, 2009 ). Therefore, we strictly controlled the role of the target person and semantically linked the relevant questions to the ERP project, which is a more perceivable unit of analysis than the whole organization. The interviewees for this study were IT managers, which may have assessed ERP-related benefits more highly than general managers. However, contem- porary studies on ERP benefit perceptions report very similar perceptions by IT and general management staff. This empirical observation was partly explained by the increasing pervasiveness of IT in the modern business ( Chang, 2006 ). Also, the majority of our sample firms come from the manufacturing sector. Further studies may consider to investigate ERP benefits in specific industrial sectors such as shipping and transport ( Ng et al., 2013 ), where IT is an important part of their operations. Our latent- variable structuring approach requires multiple operational- izations of each construct, which is seen to be more reliable than single-indicator measurements especially in mediation models ( Baron and Kenny, 1986 ). Due to the breadth of the subject, future study need a cumulative research strategy to better understand how to generate value from interconnected dynamic capabilities. More work is needed towards a validated and converged capability framework for IT to make it easier for management to identify how and where to begin with controlling and optimizing IT-enabled business transformations