Implementing enterprise resource planning systems: implications for management accounting

New, integrated information systems, particularly enterprise resource planning systems (ERPS), have begun to challenge the traditional roles played by management accountants. The aim of our research project is to examine how the implementation of a new ERPS impacts on the roles played by management accountants within modern organizations. By drawing on structuration theory, we argue that such change can be profitably interpreted at three different levels of the structuration process—signification, legitimation, and domination— while proposing that information technologies, as instanced by ERPS, represent modalities of structuration. A dynamic conceptual framework is provided that links the adoption of an ERPS to the shift from a functional view of organizational activities to a process view. This shows how the reopening of the taken-for-granted assumptions about the activities and the relationships appropriate for the different classes of organizational actors can lead to a change in the roles played by management accountants. Finally, we propose to use the framework as a basis for interpretive case studies aimed at providing an understanding of the change in the roles of management accountants within the wider socio-economic context of the organization in which a new ERPS is introduced.