The effect of organisational cultures and subcultures on enterprise system implementation

• Main Author: Stuart, Lindsay
• Language: en
• Published: University of Canterbury. Accounting and Information Systems 2014
• Subjects: Enterprise systems; organisational culture; dialectics
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10092/8795

Enterprise systems (ES) are important cross-business software that can be difficult to implement. A key factor impacting ES implementation lies with the influence of organisational cultures and subcultures which may enable or hinder such implementations. Existing research has focused on culture as being a stable, homogenous variable and little consideration has been given to the dynamics of cultural and organisational change during ES implementations. This study uses eight cultural dimensions (Detert et al, 2000) to examine instances of dialectic conflict between opposing cultural values and how these can impact ES implementations. This study uses data drawn from four case studies of large organisations that had implemented ES. The results identified five cultural dimensions where there was evidence of a cultural conflict between each organisation and the ES implementation. The results also found evidence that different subcultures within the organisation operated in different ways to facilitate or impede the adoption of the system. The evidence showed that the implementations resulted in cultural changes within each organisation to reflect the values embedded in the ES. This research therefore provides valuable insights into the cultural effects of large-scale implementations at an organisational level and shows that such effects are not necessarily homogenous and may vary due to the cultural values of subgroups involved.