Understanding Process Knowledge Change in Enterprise System Implementation: A Framework and Case Study

The adoption of an enterprise system often results in a substantial change of the supported business processes. Research in the area of business process redesign has traditionally focused on performance metrics for measuring process change. However, from the perspective of an employee performing the business process, such measurements are inadequate because they fail to account for the knowledge change required for the employee to perform the new process. This paper presents a framework of process change elements from the knowledge perspective. We show how the framework relates to a training knowledge framework proposed by other researchers and discuss its implications for selection of training strategies. We then discuss applications to and preliminary findings from a case study involving enterprise system adoption at the healthcare facility of a large public university.