Winds of change : A study of actor groups and the art of choosing and implementing an ERP system

Management accounting is performed with the support of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Because of their integrated design and use of joint databases, such systems are often said to present companies with various opportunities for improving operations. In practice, however, difficulties have been encountered in attempting to realize these promised opportunities. Research into the ERP implementation process has explained these problems in terms of a tendency of companies to preserve the status quo instead of realizing change, or as representing the unintended consequences of ERP implementation. However, existing studies are limited in several respects. They define the implementation process as separate, unconnected to the process by which the ERP system was evaluated and chosen in the first place. Furthermore, they limit the process by analyzing it in terms of norms and rules, or power, or as solely cognitive, instead of defining it as complex, comprising all these dimensions at once. A final limitation is that the organization is often defined as a harmonious unit, lacking internal conflict or opposition; if internal conflict is taken into account, it is considered to occur only between different professions in the company, for example, production staff as opposed to accountants. These limitations constrain our knowledge of management accounting change in the setting of ERP systems. The objective of this empirical study is to enhance our knowledge of how a company – consisting of actor groups having different interests and purposes – chooses and implements an ERP system. The study defines this as a structuration process, with a duality between structure and action. Change and stability are co-existent. Social structures are defined as three-dimensional structures in which participation, images of IT systems, and conceptions of IT use as norms are simultaneously present in agency (i.e., speech and behaviour). The actor groups are defined as secondary groups, formal relationships existing between their members. The objective of the study is to create a deeper understanding of how social structures influence the process. A longitudinal case study examined a manufacturer having three distinct business areas. Material was collected mainly through interviews and observation, by also by examining documentation. The use of an abductive approach, aiming to improve theory, resulted in a detailed proposal as to how to operationalize the three modalities of the structuration model. The search for deeper knowledge resulted in the identification of six actor groups and several propositions as to how social structures influence the process. The concepts of uncertainty and practical experience were found to be especially important