The Socio-technical Borderland of Interaction: An ERP module case study

Abstract

In step with a greater demand for information quality and business capabilities, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have gained a pivotal role in today's or- ganizations and have thus been researched extensively. However, there is still a relative lack of ERP studies concerning themselves with the post-implementation phase of the system's life-cycle. Research has been preoccupied with implementation studies which have a tendency to 'take the system for granted' and view it as a stable phenomenon or a black box after it has been implemented. The purpose of this study is to investigate how the social and the technical system of an ERP landscape interact post-implementation, and seek the answer to how this network achieves and loses stability. With the help of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), and the concept of translation (Callon, 1984), our single case study of a large multinational company was able to show how these systems never truly stabilizes because of changing technology and interests, but that it is possible to achieve temporary stability by forcefully locking and consequently silencing the actors. It was also shown how this treatment of actors could induce weak irreversibility into the network and how the price for temporary stability had to be paid a-plenty at a later stage.