Process flowcharts: malleable visual mediators of ERP implementation

This chapter engages with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in an empirical setting. Our interest is in ERP implementation and the visual objects, the flowcharts that are deployed to help with this task. Flowcharts are a well-established tool from the pre-computer era dating back to around the early 1920s. The rhetoric surrounding their acceptance in a variety of settings includes their ability to capture important aspects of yet-to-be-created and complex real systems and to communicate them effectively to a wide vareity of audiences (Boczko, 2007; Colter, 1984). The symbols for writing a flow chart have been standarized and disseminated by the national standards body of the United Kingdom (UK) British Standards Institution (BSI) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). ... ... Our aim in this chapter is to further demonstrate the centrality of these artifacts and trace their function as representations, inscriptions, and boundary objects (Carlile, 2002, 2004; Gal et al., 2004; Star and Greisemer, 1989