Feral Systems and Enterprise Resource Planning Systems: Content and Dynamics

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems continue, even in 2013, to be an important change agenda in business. This chapter initially addresses two major issues left aside in the Information Systems (IS) research on ERP: The technological content and the time dynamics. Using two different small reviews of journal articles, the authors conclude that ERP research is disregarding the profound technology changes and their impact on the challenges for employees, when implementing and operating ERP. Actors within organizations are in fact attempting to cope with these profound technology changes and the business challenges associated with ERP implementations by finding ways to fit their practices into these large integrated systems, and one strategy is developing their own (feral) systems. The chapter concludes with a call for more training and education for all employees in the content of the ERP and a need to build more contextual research in the study of ERP.