A Stakeholder Perspective Of Enterprise Systems

While the rise of the Internet has received most of the media attention in recent years, the business world’s embrace of enterprise systems may in fact be the most important development in the corporate use of information technology in the 1990s (Davenport 1998). Therefore, it would be prudent for greater attention to be given to the study of enterprise systems per se, so that we may then apply our findings to particular systems (e.g. ERP, CRM, KMS, and SCM). This paper begins with an overview of what constitutes an enterprise system. From there, considering the host of stakeholders that an organization has to deal with in relation to its enterprise system, this paper looks at stakeholder theory and how it can be used to better understand and manage an organization’s stakeholders. The paper then presents a sample model that could be useful in such an analysis, before concluding with a look at four propositions that could serve as potential areas for future research.