Abstract

Faced with increasingly strong and varied forms of competition, firms are seeking more efficient organizational models. At the same time, the widespread application of information and communication technologies (ICT) is transforming the manner in which the information required for coordinating the units within an organization is collected, exchanged, and stored. The question then arises of how the installation of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) program may affect these coordination mechanisms. The subordination of technological change to organizational change appears to underestimate the scope of the transformations that ERP can bring about within an organization. Theoretical and empirical arguments lean towards attributing direct effects to ERP, believing it to possess intrinsic organizational virtues. Because of the difficulty of making an ad hoc inventory of organizations employing ERP software, earlier statistical studies have largely ignored the integration of ERP into the organization.

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