Enhancing Understanding of Cross-Cultural ERP Implementation Impact with a FVM Perspective Enriched by ANT

Abstract

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems, and more especially their successful adoption and implementation, have been the subject of extensive research as can be evidenced by the large body of literature on this and related topics in the extant literature to date. However, the effect of cross-cultural issues has been less widely studied, perhaps because of the difficulty and complexity of such cross-cultural studies. In today's global business environment this remains a key issue and critical success factor. Hence, this paper explains how challenging the cross-cultural ERP implementation implementation success is for organizations and how important it is to assess a fit and viability of cross-cultural ERP implementations in diverse cultures (which is especially important in economies heavily reliant on off-shoring services). By drawing upon multiple streams of theory building, a framework, from the Fit-Viability Model (FVM) perspective, is developed. The framework provides important and valuable guiding principles for organizations for their decisions on adoption and deployment of Enterprise Systems (ES). Further, the paper proffers the use of ANT (Actor-Network Theory) to enrich the analysis and provides a systematic approach for moving forward with a multi-case study to test the proposed framework.