Exploring Knowledge Integration in Erp Project Teams

Many companies are adopting Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in the hope that these systems will help them transform their organizational processes to improve efficiency and flexibility. Unfortunately, many organizations do not realize the hoped-for benefits, and indeed there have been some examples of disastrous failures. There are likely to be a variety of factors that influence the relative success of an ERP implementation project. In this paper we focus on the extent to which an implementation team is able to share and integrate disparate and ambiguous knowledge in a way that generates new ideas about organizational processes that can support transformational change. We compare two ERP implementation project teams in this paper; one achieved only a mechanistic pooling of knowledge while the other achieved more generative knowledge integration that supported some significant organizational change. Clear differences were observed in the ways these two project teams were managed and run. These differences are explored in relation to their impact on knowledge integration. This leads us to suggest some ways in which ERP projects can be managed to support a level of knowledge integration that is more likely to encourage transformational change.