Diffusion of Open Source ERP Systems Development: How Users Are Involved

Open Source receives high attention among organizations today, and there is also a growing interest on Open Source Enterprise Resource Planning (OS ERP) systems. Open source development is often considered having a high level of involvement from stakeholders in adopting organizations. However, it depends on for the first what is meant by stakeholders, but also what is meant by involvement. In the area of ERP development stakeholder involvement is defined as to what extent users of the system are involved in the development of the standardized software package. The way this is done differs between different vendors but it can be summarized as dealing with management of requirements. In this paper we explore how requirements management is done in development of OS ERP. To do this, we use a theoretical base on requirements management in the ERP field from which we investigate stakeholder involvement in four organizations and the development of it’s respectively OS ERP system. The basic question asked was: how are end-users of OS ERPs involved in the development of OS ERP. From the investigation we present a general picture of the requirements management process in the OS ERP area. The main conclusion is that end-users are not involved to the extent first expected and when comparing with proprietary ERP development a tendency towards a similar approach to requirements management in OS ERP development was discovered.