Evaluation and Importance of a Pre-Change Stage in an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Implementation Perspective in India: A Conceptual Framework

Abstract

Any technological development in an organization leads to great change at an individual and organizational level. The new demanding responsibilities during an information technology (IT) intervention tend to create mental unrest, fear, and friction in the workforce, more so in a developing country like India. The unique issues faced by India could be rooted in its history of information communication technology (ICT) development in purely Indian origin organizations. The IT growth in this context has been unbridled and too fast paced, taking the workforce by surprise in a short time span. From basic rudimentary IT systems in the country, these organizations have moved to sophisticated packages such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) to address the business pressures, information integration issues, and expectations arising from competition with multinationals operating in the same space. In this context it becomes important to test and evaluate the required elements in a change program to ensure better outcomes, keeping in mind the Indian context and its sociocultural differences. This article describes the evolution of evaluation framework, summarizes the relevant ERP literature, and attempts to choose the change factors that should be included in a multistage change program to achieve an individual impact level of outcome irrespective of the origin of the organization. This framework would need to be further tested in an Indian corporate scenario through a survey of change recipients with focus on any particular weak link in the stages of change, and the differences, if any, would need to be studied by comparison with Western origin organizations that have adopted robust multistage change programs resulting in high individual level change outcome.