Measuring the business success of enterprise systems projects
type: CreativeWork
description: Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are integrated application software packages that meet most of the information systems requirements of business organisations. ERP, or more simply enterprise systems (ES), have constituted the majority of investment in information technology by global businesses over the last two decades and have had a profound impact upon the way these businesses have been managed. Yet there is not a good understanding of how the business success, as opposed to the implementation project success, of enterprise systems projects can be evaluated. Of the two success concepts, extant literature places more emphasis upon project success rather than business success. This research is directed at exploring the relationship between planned business success, generally included in ERP project business cases, and subsequent, empirical, post-implementation measures of business success. The study involved the interviewing of 20 key informants from both ERP adopting companies and ERP consulting firms to answer the research question of ‘how do businesses evaluate the business success, as opposed to the project implementation success, of enterprise systems?’ Using 10 a priori categories derived from the literature, 100 correlated categories were identified from interview data by use of a three stage coding process; 25 categories were selected from this larger group to identify relationships that were the most pertinent to the central research question. The key findings of the research were that the strength of the ERP system business case was generally determined by three main categories of business driver; strategic business change, a lower cost business model and business survival. These categories of business driver then determined the criteria for business success applied to the project in post-implementation stages. Where lower cost business models, often involving shared service centres and outsourcing of these centralised functions, were the driver…
abstract: Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are integrated application software packages that meet most of the information systems requirements of business organisations. ERP, or more simply enterprise systems (ES), have constituted the majority of investment in information technology by global businesses over the last two decades and have had a profound impact upon the way these businesses have been managed. Yet there is not a good understanding of how the business success, as opposed to the implementation project success, of enterprise systems projects can be evaluated. Of the two success concepts, extant literature places more emphasis upon project success rather than business success. This research is directed at exploring the relationship between planned business success, generally included in ERP project business cases, and subsequent, empirical, post-implementation measures of business success. The study involved the interviewing of 20 key informants from both ERP adopting companies and ERP consulting firms to answer the research question of ‘how do businesses evaluate the business success, as opposed to the project implementation success, of enterprise systems?’ Using 10 a priori categories derived from the literature, 100 correlated categories were identified from interview data by use of a three stage coding process; 25 categories were selected from this larger group to identify relationships that were the most pertinent to the central research question. The key findings of the research were that the strength of the ERP system business case was generally determined by three main categories of business driver; strategic business change, a lower cost business model and business survival. These categories of business driver then determined the criteria for business success applied to the project in post-implementation stages. Where lower cost business models, often involving shared service centres and outsourcing of these centralised functions, were the driver…
author: Jones, Richard
keywords: QA76 Computer software
date published: 2016
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:39:30Z
provider: City University of London
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: City, University of London