Comparing the relative importance of evaluation criteria in proprietary and open-source enterprise application software selection - a conjoint study of ERP and Office systems

Abstract

Until recently, organizations willing to acquire application systems have had no choice but to adopt proprietary software. With the advent of open-source software (OSS), a new model for developing and distributing software has entered the stage. OSS has evolved from a generally horizontal infrastructure towards more highly visible applications in vertical domains, giving information systems (IS) managers more degrees of freedom in their selection of enterprise application software (EAS). Although a large body of research exists on the relative importance of evaluation criteria for proprietary EAS, the role of OSS in the EAS evaluation process has received little attention so far. To address this research gap, this study represents the first empirical investigation to compare the relative importance of evaluation criteria in proprietary and open-source EAS selection. Through an online survey, we evaluated the responses of IS managers of 358 organizations to a conjoint study spawning 8592 trade-off pair comparisons and 3580 purchase evaluations on proprietary and open-source enterprise resource planning (ERP) and Office software packages. The results show that the relative importance of evaluation criteria significantly varies between proprietary and open-source ERP systems. Implementation factors such as ease of implementation and support are much more crucial in the evaluation of open-source than of proprietary ERP systems, which is generally due to IS managers' risk mitigation behaviour. Interestingly, there are no major differences in the ranking of evaluation criteria between proprietary and open-source Office systems. We conclude our paper with a detailed discussion of our findings and their implications for researchers, companies, EAS vendors and open-source communities.