A methodology for enterprise systems post-implementation change management
| Published date | 04 December 2017 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/IMDS-11-2016-0506 |
| Pages | 2241-2262 |
| Date | 04 December 2017 |
| Author | Marco Comuzzi,Minou Parhizkar |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information systems,Data management systems,Knowledge management,Knowledge sharing,Management science & operations,Supply chain management,Supply chain information systems,Logistics,Quality management/systems |
A methodology for enterprise
systems post-implementation
change management
Marco Comuzzi
School of Management Engineering,
Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology,
Ulsan, The Republic of Korea, and
Minou Parhizkar
Department of Computer Science, City, University of London, London, UK
Abstract
Purpose –Enterprise systems (ESs) are hard to maintain, since they embed a large fraction of organisational
data and tasks, which are often intertwined and highly interdependent. The purpose of this paper is to
propose a methodology for enterprise resource planning (ERP) post-implementation change management to
support business analysts during perfective maintenance.
Design/methodology/approach –The methodology draws a parallel line with engineering change
management and considers the steps of mapping the dependencies among ES components, understanding the
ripple effects of change, and defining metrics to quantify and assess the impact of change. The methodology
is instantiated in the case of ERP systems, for which a tool has also been implemented and evaluated by ERP
implementation experts.
Findings –Experts positively evaluated the proposed methodology. General design principles to instantiate
the methodology in the case of systems other than ERP have been derived.
Originality/value –While existing ESs change management methodologies help to identify the need for
change, the proposed methodology help to structure the change process, supporting the task of perfective
maintenance in an efficient way.
Keywords ERP, Change management, Post-implementation, Enterprise system, System evolution
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Enterprise systems (ESs) are large-scale application software packages supporting business
processes and decision making in organisations. Examples of this type of systems are
enterprise resource planning (ERP) for supporting operational business processes, customer
relationship management (CRM) for supporting customer-facing activities, and product
lifecycle management (PLM) for supporting product design and configuration management
(Bhattacharya et al., 2010; Shang and Seddon, 2002).
Once implemented, organisations inevitably make selective changes to align ES
capabilities with tactical and strategic objectives. In ESs, these changes are referred to as
post-implementation changes or perfective maintenance (Themistocleous et al., 2001;
Oseni et al., 2014).
Post-implementation changes occur because of business and technical motivations
(Ng et al., 2002). Business motivations refer to changes aiming at improving productivity
and market performance. Technical motivations refer to changes to include within the scope
of an ES new technical capabilities available in the market. Motivations for change can also
be internal or external. While most post-implementation changes are demanded by forces
internal to organisations, other changes may be dictated by external pressures, such as from
regulatory bodies or technology providers (Ng et al., 2002). Industrial Management & Data
Systems
Vol. 117 No. 10, 2017
pp. 2241-2262
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0263-5577
DOI 10.1108/IMDS-11-2016-0506
Received 29 November 2016
Revised 25 January 2017
Accepted 10 February 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0263-5577.htm
This work was supported by the 0000 Research Fund (Project No. 1.160044.01) of Ulsan National
Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST).
2241
ESs post-
implementation
change
management
Most medium to large organisations have already gone through at least one
implementation cycle of different types of ES, such as ERP, CRM or PLM systems, and
currently find themselves in the post-implementation phase. Hence, post-implementation is
nowadays considered the most critical phase to realise the value of ES (Clark et al., 2009).
A successful ES implementation project does not necessarily guarantee success in the
post-implementation phase (Ha and Ahn, 2014; Yu, 2005; Zhu et al., 2010). This calls for
research to analyse the determinants of post-implementation ES success. The literature
about ESs post-implementation critical success factors (CSFs) and, in particular, how these
differ from CSFs of the implementation phase is abundant (Ram et al., 2013; Ha and Ahn,
2014; Moalagh and Ravasan, 2013). The quality of the implemented system and of the data it
uses are often identified as technical CSF of ES post-implementation (Zhu et al., 2010; Ifinedo
et al., 2010). Uncontrolled or poorly managed ES post-implementation changes may lead to
low quality and chaotic systems and to data that are hard to use and maintain. These are
likely to lead to poor decision making and business process performance, which ultimately
deteriorates profitability and productivity (Law et al., 2010; Grabski et al., 2011; Ifinedo et al.,
2010; Yu, 2005).
In this paper, we propose a constructivist, i.e. design-oriented, methodology to support
stakeholders, such as business analysts and developers, in the implementation of ESs
post-implementation changes. The proposed methodology complements the typically
positivist approach of CSF identification and validation identified in the literature, giving ES
stakeholders scientifically grounded principles, methods and tools to guide the assessment,
implementation and review of ES post-implementation changes. More in detail, our
methodology complements the work by Nicolaou (2004) and Nicolaou and Bhattacharya
(2008), who first have identified fine-grained activities related to ERP post-implementation
review (PIR). Our methodology, in fact, can be perceived as an operational tool to support
post-implementation changes emerging from the typical PIR activities identified by
Nicolaou (2004), such as review of process integration, process integration, misfit resolution
or process reengineering.
The proposed methodology draws a parallel between ES post-implementation change
management and engineering change management in product design and manufacturing.
ES, in fact, can be perceived as a type of product in use by organisations to internally
support their operational and decision-making processes. The ES “product”has a complex
static design structure and its use is embedded in a complex socio-technical reality, which
can be deeply affected by changes in the post-implementation phase. As in the case of
engineering change management in product design, ES changes should be carefully
assessed before being implemented, to evaluate their impact on the current structure of
the system, possibly predict implementation effort, and plan the implementation phase
(Hamraz et al., 2013).
To evaluate the feasibility of the proposed methodology, we discuss a proof-of-concept
instantiation of it in the context of ERP systems. As part of the proof of concept, the
artefacts defined by the methodology have been embedded in a decision support software
system supporting impact analysis and assessment of ERP post-implementation changes.
The tool has been evaluated by seven ERP experts in hands-on sessions with different ERP
change management scenarios.
The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 discusses related work. The methodology is
presented in Section 3, while Section 4 discusses its instantiation in the case of ERP systems.
A discussion is provided in Section 5, whereas conclusions are drawn in Section 6.
2. Background and related work
The discipline of engineering change management has gained increased popularity within
systems engineering in the last 20 years (Hamraz et al., 2013). In the context of ES, we adopt
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