ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE MANAGEMENT IN ERP IMPLEMENTATION PROCESS

Despite numerous successful Enterprise Systems (ES) implementation processes, there has also been a plethora of failures. Recent studies on Information Systems (IS) project failure reveal a number of interesting themes, such as unrealistic expectations, lack of resources, uncooperative customers, and weak management of contractors (Brown and Jones, 1998). Other themes also encompass the technical aspects of the system, such as failure in meeting predefined design objectives (Markus and Keil, 1994). Nevertheless, many IS studies indicate that failure is largely due to organizational and social, rather than technical factors (Fitzgerald and Russo, 2005). Testing for organizational readiness is as important as analyzing technical feasibility. It is crucial the analysis of organizational issues and change management process in ERP implementations, identifying effective strategies to manage changes such as user resistance, related user behaviors and actions, etc. In this paper, a literature review on change management is presented to draw a list of change management interventions to enable ERP implementation process. Three explorative case studies were realized in three US firms who implemented an ERP. The aim is to understand if these firms were able to plan the change management interventions. First results show how firms are aware of the organizational problems before the implementation start, but they aren’t so able to plan the right change management interventions.