| dc.description.abstract | In recent years, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, by providing firmwide integration, have become a very popular solution for coordinating activities and decisions that span multiple functions. However, knowledge gap between the stakeholders (e.g., end-users, IS department personnel, and the ERP vendor) potentially cause the unsuccessful implementation because this gap raises not only the risks of configuration errors and unnecessary customization, but also the conflicts between the different participants involved. The need for knowledge integration in the ERP project is therefore important.
The motivation of this study was to develop an understanding of the factors that enable project teams to rapidly implement complex ERP projects with successful knowledge integration. This knowledge-integration view was operationalized in an ERP context and various factors that influence knowledge integration in project teams were examined. The influence of knowledge integration mechanism on various dimensions of ERP systems success including misfits of delivered system, system quality, project implementation success, and individual and organizational impacts was also tested. Many of these relationships have been assumed but no previous study integrates them into a theoretical model and empirically tests them.
Multiple sources and measurement methods were used to minimize common methods bias. A two-source, two-method data collection strategy was deployed. For all exogenous constructs, team member ratings were used. For ERP system success, two different measures are used: (1) team member’s assessments of project implementation success, (2) end-users evaluations of overall system success, including misfit of delivered system, system quality, and individual and organizational impacts. The empirical results confirm that knowledge integration mechanism is improved with higher levels of flexible interpretation and collective interpretation, while the integration mechanism leads to a better system quality and impacts through project implementation success.
From a theoretical perspective, this study extends IS implementation, organizational learning, and knowledge integration theory in at least five important ways. The primary contribution of this study is that of investigating the relationship between knowledge integration and ERP project implementation success. Second, a team-level theoretical model for successful knowledge integration and its sources was proposed. Third, three new scales to measure flexible interpretation, collective interpretation, and knowledge integration mechanism at project team level were developed and validated. Fourth, the relationship between technological interpretation and knowledge integration was proposed. Finally, the frame of reference for measuring IS success was extended and a scale (misfit of delivered system) was developed to incorporate the notion of ERP adaptation to organizational requirements into the IS success measure. For managers and practitioners, this study provides guidelines for managing ERP projects.
Three key limitations of this study are noteworthy. First, the argument for studying knowledge integration as a group-level phenomenon necessitates using teams as the unit of analysis. Empirical work of this nature will necessarily involve aggregating data to the team level. Second, the project teams that constituted the sample are temporary teams for implementing ERP projects. The nature of these projects is expected to be sufficiently different from those implemented by stable IS units in non-ERP contexts. Finally, further research is needed to understand ERP system quality and the factors that affect it. | en_US |