Ensuring ERP Projects Achievement through Legitimating Practices

Even if ERP implementations represent a high-cost high-risk endeavor, organizations still invest precious financial, human and time resources in these projects. In this paper, we aim at uncovering how implementers’ practices affect ERP project legitimacy. The preliminary analysis of our results compares data collected from two cases studies: a North-American university and an Asian corporation. Our results reveal that, while legitimating practices must be enforced at both the organizational and individual levels, the path to achieve such legitimacy will likely be different from one context to another. While our results confirm that the pragmatic, moral and cognitive aspects of legitimacy are critical to ensure the achievement of an ERP project, our cases also suggest that the timing and saliency of a given legitimacy aspect will be different from an organization to another.