Archival Analysis Of Enterprise Resource Planning Systems: The Current State And Future Directions

In 2000, scholars Estevez and Pastor completed an archival analysis of Enterprise Systems (ES) research, published in Communications of the Association for Information Systems. The objective of the authors was to establish “an annotated bibliography of the ERP publications published in the main Information Systems conferences and journals and to review the state of art in this area” (Esteves and Pastor 2001, p1). In the study, the authors categorized journal articles according to the lifecycle phases of ERP system and further studied the articles within granular topics of interest. Six years later in 2006, using the same classification system and analytical approach, Estevez and Bohorquez produced an updated annotated bibliography (Esteves and Bohorquez 2007), focusing on the period 2001-2005. For this, the scholars eliminated incongruities in the first paper and added a “significant number of new publications in all the categories” (Esteves and Bohorquez 2007, p1). Building on Estevez and Pastor and in the spirit of building cumulative knowledge on ES, we build an archival analysis of ES studies from 2006-2012 to comment on the current state of ES studies and to direct future research on this important phenomena.