Using Stakeholder Theory to Analyze Knowledge Sharing During Enterprise Systems Implementations

Enterprise Systems (ES) are comprehensive yet complex systems to implement, involving numerous stakeholders, each with specific domain knowledge, which are crucial to the success of the ES project. It would therefore be prudent for greater attention to be given to the study of knowledge sharing during ES implementations. This is a conceptual paper, which begins with an overview of why stakeholders and their domain knowledge are important to ES projects. Next, it highlights four key categories of stakeholders involved in ES implementations, and their dynamic nature during the project. It then applies the concepts of stakeholder theory to analyze stakeholder knowledge sharing during ES implementations in three areas. Firstly, it looks at stakeholder identification of the relevant stakeholders and their domain knowledge. Secondly, it considers stakeholder prioritization of the more important stakeholders and domain knowledge in each phase of the project. Thirdly, it looks at stakeholder management of inter-stakeholder knowledge sharing. Finally, this study presents seven propositions that can serve as potential areas for future research.