Organizational memory and the completeness of process modeling in ERP systems: Some concerns, methods and directions for future research

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems not only have a broad functional scope promising to support many different business processes, they also embed many different aspects of the company’s organizational memory. Disparities can exist between those memory contents in the ERP system and related contents in other memory media, such as individuals’ memories, and the organizational structure and culture. It is our contention that, in general, these disparities or memory mismatches, as we will refer to them, lead to under-performance of ERP systems. In this paper we focus on potential memory mismatches that may arise with respect to the embedding of process knowledge within ERP packages. Packages such as SAP provide a varied and rich environment for process modeling. However, we suspect that there are still many instances where process knowledge is either lost or represented in different ways in different parts of the organization. As we will discuss, the results of such memory mismatches will often not become evident until the system is in use. The overall thrust of the paper is to identify a variety of concerns, intriguing questions and avenues for future research. Introduction In this paper we focus on problems that may arise after enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have been implemented ± the in-use phase as we will refer to it. Various problems can be identified regarding the ERP systems inuse. Because of the organizational unwillingness or inability to make technology upgrades (Markus and Tanis, 2000), the enterprise system may take on the appearance of a legacy system in disguise. Furthermore, the users may still be working around the system or maintaining old procedures, instead of learning the relevant ERP capabilities (Marcus and Tanis, 2000). These problems are not only technological and organizational in nature, but they also involve cognitive aspects, such as adjusting existing work methods, mental models, and data-models. Hence, to solve the problems and enhance the ERP system successfully, it is necessary to view the ERP system in a broad sense, including technological, organizational, and cognitive aspects. The research register for this journal is available at http://www.mcbup.com/research_registers The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at http://www.emerald-library.com/ft