Document Type
Article
Publication Date
5-1-2015
Abstract
Organizations make significant investments in enterprise-wide system development--also known as enterprise resource planning (ERP). They deploy several governance mechanisms to achieve strategic goals associated with the system implementations. Yet, success in such endeavors remains elusive. To improve success rates, companies have, for some time, deployed organization-wide executive steering committees which oversee these initiatives. Still, scholars and practitioners have limited understanding of what makes these committees, if at all, successful. This study contributes to limited research on steering committees by examining engaged steering committees (in contrast to portfolio balancing committee)--which oversee enterprise-wide system implementations--success in enterprise-wide system implementations in three ways. First, founded on information processing theory this research extends how a steering committee can successfully grapple with ERP project implementations through stacking up absorptive capacity. Second, the paper develops a new process quality construct and finds that creating effective steering committee processes contributes to project success. Third, the paper finds that environmental and relationship uncertainty have a negative effect on a steering committee's ability to achieve enterprise system implementation success and the level of uncertainty moderates negatively the impact of absorptive capacity. Several conclusions for practice and theory of complex system implementation governance are suggested.
Keywords
management, organizational effectiveness, Weatherhead School of Management, enterprise systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP), implementation, governance, steering committee, project performance, information processing view, absorptive capacity, committee effectiveness, uncertainty
Rights
© The Author(s). This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Department/Center
Design & Innovation
Recommended Citation
Murphy, Kris, "Does Steering Committee Information Processing Capacity Influence Project Success in Enterprise Wide System Implementations - A Field Study" (2015). Student Scholarship. 173.
https://commons.case.edu/studentworks/173