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Enterprise systems (ES) have been a major trend in both the private and public sectors over the past decade. They have been on the market since the beginning of the 90s (Jacobs & Weston, 2007) as a solution to the growing tendency for globalization, mergers and acquisitions (Chang, Gold, & Kettinger, 2003) and as a way to optimize and improve business operation (Häkkinen & Hilmola, 2008). The implementation of ES is often complex due to enterprise-wide integration and data standardization, adoption to “best-practice” business models with re-engineering of business processes, compressed schedules and, finally, the participation of a large number of stakeholders (Soh, Kien, & Tay-Yap, 2000, p. 47). ES often trigger major organizational changes and at the same time introduce high risk with a potential high reward (Chae & Lanzara, 2006, p. 100; Markus, 2004). Some companies have gained an important increase in productivity and speed (Häkkinen & Hilmola, 2008), while others have experienced failure-prone ES implementations (Grabski, Leech, & Lu, 2003; Sumner, 2003) due to users’ resistance (Grabski et al., 2003; Sumner, 2003), lack of senior management support (Sumner, 2003), misalignment between the ES and the organization (Sia & Soh, 2007) and many other reasons. Still others have highly overestimated the value of ES (Davenport, 1998; Robbins-Gioia, 2002) and realized that the benefits did not materialize (Lindley, Topping, & Lindley, 2008).
A major reason for failure-prone implementations and/or lack of benefits (Davenport, 1998) might be the focus on managerial and technical issues where instrumental solutions are considered superior and sufficient, ignoring implementation and integration problems (Dillard & Yuthas, 2006) with poor ability to manage change (see also Panorama Consulting Group, 2010). This might have severe consequences such as operational disruptions at go-live and hampered business operation afterwards (Markus, Axline, Petrie, & Tanis, 2000).
The widespread penetration of ES in organizations combined with the many challenges and problems associated with the management, implementation and use of ES implies that it is a highly important area of concern for both practice and academia. Much research has therefore been devoted to ES implementation and use in general as well as alignment between organizations and ES in particular, but, as argued by Pollock and Williams (2009) and others (Berente, 2009; Boudreau & Robey, 2005; Lamb & Kling, 2003), the research around “Enterprise Systems has been unevenly developed and unhelpfully fragmented between rather narrow (e.g. managerial or technical) perspectives” (Pollock & Williams, 2009, p. 5), which appears to simplify the social settings of modern enterprises, emphasize instrumental solutions and downplay social considerations.