A framework for successful enterprise systems implementation : preliminary findings from a case study

While critical success factors (CSFs) of enterprise system (ES) implementation are mature concepts and have received considerable attention for over a decade, researchers have very often focused on only a specific aspect of the implementation process or a specific CSF. Resultantly, there is (1) little research documented that encompasses all significant CSF considerations and (2) little empirical research into the important factors of successful ES implementation. This paper is part of a larger research effort that aims to contribute to understanding the phenomenon of ES CSFs, and reports on preliminary findings from a case study conducted at a Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Australia. This paper reports on an empirically derived CSFs framework using a directed content analysis of 79 studies; from top IS outlets, employing the characteristics of the analytic theory, and from six different projects implemented at QUT.

Mapping social enterprise in Australia : conceptual debates and their operational implications

In the last ten years, there has been growing interest in social enterprise by governments, the not for profit sector and philanthropy in Australia The drivers of this interest have been variously understood to be: increasing demands for innovative responses to social and environmental problems; pressures on non-profit organisations to diversify their income sources; and increasing emphases by government on the role of civil society actors in partnering around social policy agendas. Whatever its genesis, very little is known about the scale and scope of the emerging social enterprise sector. In order to research the scope of the sector, an important first step involves understanding just what social enterprise is, and how it may be operationalised. This paper presents the findings from the first stage of a national research project conducted by the authors in conjunction with a new social enterprise development company. The purpose of the project was to provide a comprehensive snapshot of the social enterprise sector in Australia. In this paper, we focus on the definitional debates arising from our workshop discussions, what these mean for understanding contemporary discourses of social enterprise, and their implications for research, policy and practice.

Knowledge management competence for Enterprise System success

This study conceptualizes, operationalises and validates the concept of Knowledge Management Competence as a four-phase multidimensional formative index. Employing survey data from 310 respondents representing 27 organizations using the SAP Enterprise System Financial module, the study results demonstrate a large, significant, positive relationship between Knowledge Management Competence and Enterprise Systems Success (ES-success, as conceived by Gable Sedera and Chan (2008)); suggesting important implications for practice. Strong evidence of the validity of Knowledge Management Competence as conceived and operationalised, too suggests potential from future research evaluating its relationships with possible antecedents and consequences.

Detecting collusive fraud in enterprise resource planning systems

In today's technological age, fraud has become more complicated, and increasingly more difficult to detect, especially when it is collusive in nature. Different fraud surveys showed that the median loss from collusive fraud is much greater than fraud perpetrated by a single person. Despite its prevalence and potentially devastating effects, collusion is commonly overlooked as an organizational risk. Internal auditors often fail to proactively consider collusion in their fraud assessment and detection efforts. In this paper, we consider fraud scenarios with collusion. We present six potentially collusive fraudulent behaviors and show their detection process in an ERP system. We have enhanced our fraud detection framework to utilize aggregation of different sources of logs in order to detect communication and have further enhanced it to render it system-agnostic thus achieving portability and making it generally applicable to all ERP systems.

Do programs to improve business performance in small and medium manufacturing enterprise improve opportunity recognition?

Increasing awareness of the benefits of stimulating entrepreneurial behaviour in small and medium enterprises has fostered strong interest in innovation programs. Recently many western countries have invested in design innovation for better firm performance. This research presents some early findings from a study of companies which participated in an holistic approach to design innovation, where the outcomes include better business performance and better market positioning in global markets. Preliminary findings from in-depth semi-structured interviews indicate the importance of firm openness to new ways of working and developing new processes of strategic entrepreneurship. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Semantic modeling method for configurable enterprise information systems

Business practices vary from one company to another and business practices often need to be changed due to changes of business environments. To satisfy different business practices, enterprise systems need to be customized. To keep up with ongoing business practice changes, enterprise systems need to be adapted. Because of rigidity and complexity, the customization and adaption of enterprise systems often takes excessive time with potential failures and budget shortfall. Moreover, enterprise systems often drag business behind because they cannot be rapidly adapted to support business practice changes. Extensive literature has addressed this issue by identifying success or failure factors, implementation approaches, and project management strategies. Those efforts were aimed at learning lessons from post implementation experiences to help future projects. This research looks into this issue from a different angle. It attempts to address this issue by delivering a systematic method for developing flexible enterprise systems which can be easily tailored for different business practices or rapidly adapted when business practices change. First, this research examines the role of system models in the context of enterprise system development; and the relationship of system models with software programs in the contexts of computer aided software engineering (CASE), model driven architecture (MDA) and workflow management system (WfMS). Then, by applying the analogical reasoning method, this research initiates a concept of model driven enterprise systems. The novelty of model driven enterprise systems is that it extracts system models from software programs and makes system models able to stay independent of software programs. In the paradigm of model driven enterprise systems, system models act as instructors to guide and control the behavior of software programs. Software programs function by interpreting instructions in system models. This mechanism exposes the opportunity to tailor such a system by changing system models. To make this true, system models should be represented in a language which can be easily understood by human beings and can also be effectively interpreted by computers. In this research, various semantic representations are investigated to support model driven enterprise systems. The significance of this research is 1) the transplantation of the successful structure for flexibility in modern machines and WfMS to enterprise systems; and 2) the advancement of MDA by extending the role of system models from guiding system development to controlling system behaviors. This research contributes to the area relevant to enterprise systems from three perspectives: 1) a new paradigm of enterprise systems, in which enterprise systems consist of two essential elements: system models and software programs. These two elements are loosely coupled and can exist independently; 2) semantic representations, which can effectively represent business entities, entity relationships, business logic and information processing logic in a semantic manner. Semantic representations are the key enabling techniques of model driven enterprise systems; and 3) a brand new role of system models; traditionally the role of system models is to guide developers to write system source code. This research promotes the role of system models to control the behaviors of enterprise.

Managing knowledge for enterprise systems in indian organizations: Case study insights

Many Enterprise Systems (ES) projects have reported nil or detrimental impacts despite the substantial investment in the system. Having expected positive outcomes for the organization and its functions through the weighty spend, the effective management of ES-related knowledge has been suggested as a critical success factor for these ES projects in ES implementations. This paper suggests theoretical views purporting the importance of understanding on knowledge management for ES success. To explain the complex, dynamic and multifaceted of knowledge management, we adopt the concepts in Learning Network Theory. We then conceptualized the impact of knowledge management on ES by analyzing five case studies in several industries in India, based on the Knowledge-based Theory of the Firm that captures the performance of the system.

Knowledge management for enterprise systems: observations from small, medium and large organizations

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the lifecycle-wide management of Enterprise System (ES) related knowledge is critical for ES health and longevity. At a time where many ES-vendors now offering solutions to Small and Medium size organizations, this paper investigates the ability of Small and Medium size organizations to maintain a lifecycle-wide knowledge management strategy. The paper explores the alleged differences in the knowledge management practices across 27 small, medium and large organizations that had implemented a market-leading ES. Results suggest that: (1) despite similar knowledge creation efforts in all three organizational sizes, small organizations struggle with retaining, transferring and applying the knowledge. The study also reveals that, (2) the overall goodness of the knowledge management process in larger organizations remains higher than their small and medium counterparts.

Introducing a small and medium enterprises syllabi design: an enterprise systems hands-on approach

There is increasing attention to the importance of Enterprise Systems (ES) and Information Systems (IS) for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). The same attention must be addressed in IS graduate curriculum. Studies reveal that despite healthy demand from the industry for IS management expertise, most IS graduates are ill-equipped to meet the challenges of modern organizations. The majority of contemporary firms, represented by SMEs, seek employees with a balance of business process knowledge and ES software skills. This article describes a curriculum that teaches Information Technology (IT) and IS managementconcepts in a SMEs context. The curriculum conceptualises a ‘learn-by-doing’ approach, to provide business process and ES software specific knowledge for its students. The approach recommends coverage of traditional content related to SMEs’’ operations, strategies, IT investment and management issues while providing an increased focus on strategic use of enterprise IT. The study addresses to an extent, the perennial challenge of updating IS curriculum, given the rapid pace of technological change.

Developing a knowledge base for enterprise system success: the role of management and operational staff

Knowledge base is one of the emerging concepts in the Knowledge Management area. As there exists no agreed- upon standard definition of a knowledge base, this paper defines a knowledge base in terms of our research of Enterprise Systems (ES). The knowledge base is defined with reference to Learning Network Theory. Using this theoretical framework, we investigate the roles of management and operational staff in organisations and how their interactions can create a better ES-knowledge base to contribute to ES success. We focus on the post- implementation phase of ES as part of the ES lifecycle. Our findings will facilitate future research directions and contribute to better understandings of how the knowledge base can be integrated and how this integration leads to Enterprise System success.

Where do we find services in enterprise architectures? A comparative approach

In recent years, enterprise architecture (EA) has captured growing attention as a means to systematically consolidate and interrelate diverse IT artefacts in order to provide holistic decision support. Since the emergence of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), many attempts have been made to incorporate SOA artefacts in existing EA frameworks. Yet the approaches taken to achieve this goal differ substantially for the most commonly used EA frameworks to date. This paper investigates and compares five widely used EA frameworks in the way they embrace the SOA paradigm. It identifies what SOA artefacts are considered to be in the respective EA frameworks and their relative position in the overall structure. The results show that services and related artefacts are far from being well-integrated constructs in current EA frameworks. The comparison presented in this paper will support practitioners in identifying an EA framework that provides SOA support in a way that matches their requirements and will hopefully inspire the academic EA and SOA communities to work on a closer integration of these architectures.

Enterprise architecture and the integration of service-oriented architecture

In recent years, enterprise architecture (EA) has captured a growing attention as a means to systematically consolidate and interrelate diverse business and IT artefacts in order to provide holistic decision support. The recent popularity of a service-orientation has added “service “and related constructs as a new element that requires consideration within an Enterprise Architecture. Since the emergence of the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), many attempts have been made to incorporate SOA artefacts in existing EA frameworks. Yet, the approaches taken to achieve this goal differ substantially for the most commonly used EA frameworks to date. SOA in the context of enterprise architecture is one of the future research challenges. Several authors argue that further research is needed in order to understand how SOA impacts prior enterprise architecture frameworks. This study explores SOA integration within EA, identifies SOA integration approaches within EA and identifies factors that impact SOA integration within Enterprise Architecture.

The business of fashion : entrepreneurship and enterprise learning for the new ‘creative’ global marketplace – the Australian case study [Abstract]

While the fashion industry is normally first to recognise trends and embrace creativity, fashion designers are sometimes the last to acknowledge that business acumen and entrepreneurial skills are needed. However, fashion designers and entrepreneurs are now all members of the new ‘creative’ global marketplace with its inherent need to sell globally and be competitive with international brands. For the Australian industry, this tension creates enormous pressures due to Australia’s small population (and market/s), the decreasing textile and manufacturing base, the increase of ‘creative’ micro businesses and with this the increasing number of young Australians wanting to start their own fashion business. This paper highlights the current size of the Australian fashion industry, the trend for small business models, the ‘career portfolio’ entrepreneur and strategies Australian universities are undertaking to address students wishing to enter the business of fashion. It also identifies case studies where enterprise learning pedagogy has been successfully implemented into the business education of an Australian fashion program and concludes with recommendations for an enterprise pedagogy that creates authentic learning, while working with industry and community stakeholders in flexible university formats.