Organizational memory and the completeness of process modeling in ERP systems

Abstract

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.

Understanding behavioral sources of process variation following enterprise system deployment

“…Studies based on these models suggest that contextually focused issues such as "control" (Zammuto and O'Connor, 1992) and "fit with existing process" can have significant impact on the form of intended use and dependent measures of performance (c.f. Bendoly and Jacobs, 2004;Van Stijn and Wensley, 2001). Although detractors have criticized the paucity of evidence in support of the virtues of such models as improvements on TRA and TAM (e.g., Venkatesh, 1999;Venkatesh and Davis, 2000), there is a clear competing camp that has attempted to emphasize the empirical support of their contributions (Beaudry and Pinsonneault, 2005;Chau and Hu, 2001;Dishaw and Strong, 1999;Taylor and Todd, 1995;Taylor and Tucker, 1989;Mathieson, 1991).…”

“…One might anticipate such "rotation" to continue until perceived misfit is no longer a strong enough force to drive the pursuit of additional work-arounds. Such stopping conditions may exist either because practice has sufficiently approached work-expectations and/or because expectations themselves have been altered (Van Stijn and Wensley, 2001). …”

“…Based on the suggestiveness of this case information, as well as our application of established contingency perspectives in the literature, we would expect that the greater the misfit between information system protocols and operational task requirements, the more likely that individuals will seek out actions to circumvent the information systems (Soh et aI., 2000, Van Stijn andWensley, 2001). In our research we further extend this claim by specifically proposing:…”

Graphical and Logical Formalisms for Business Process Modeling and Verification

“…In the last two decades, workflow management systems (WfMSs) have been developed to specify and execute business processes (Georgakopoulos et al 1995;Stohr and Zhao 2001). Business processes are also automated in many other information systems such as enterprise resource planning systems (Al-Mashari et al 2003;Sheth et al 1999;Stijn and Wensley 2001) and supply chain management systems (Larson and Rogers 1998;Mejza and Wisner 2001). In any of these applications, process models must be designed and implemented to satisfy specific business needs.…”

A Study on Knowledge Management in Enterprise Information Systems

“…From another angle, the information processing view considers that ERP is the centre of enterprise management; ERP enhances business performance through minimizing internal and external uncertainties by improving information flow. Although either view has its limitation, however, from systems perspective, they are complementary to each other [24].…”