Realigning Top Management's Strategic Change Actions for ERP Implementation: How Specializing on Just Cultural and Environmental Contextual Factors Could Improve Success

Abstarct

An enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and its implementation represents a substantial organizational change. Top management involvement has been cited as a critical factor in the success, as well as, failure of ERP implementation. To increase ERP implementation success, we propose that top management redesign its ERP implementation work to strategically concentrate on managing employee behavioural change to increase employee acceptance and commitment to the ERP project by specializing its involvement on just two factors – cultural and environmental contextual factors. Three case studies are used to validate this proposition. Eight strategic task, responsibility, and relationship changes to be used by top management to increase ERP implementation success are highlighted in the paper.

Keywords:

• ERP implementation
• failure
• top management
• employee behavioural change
• task realignment
• task specialization