ERP Implementation: A Technological Diffusion and Knowledge Transfer Perspective

As a recent IT innovation, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system has become strategically important to organizations. Yet ERP is difficult to implement, high failure rate has been reported. Researchers and practitioners have pointed out that ignorance of knowledge transfer from consultancy to client was the reason for poor ERP implementation experience considering ERP’s complexity and high knowledge barrier on adopters. Although IT implementation and Innovation diffusion research has identified and empirically investigated various implementation success factors, few studies have empirically examined influential factors from knowledge transfer perspective. In this study, a model of ERP success antecedents is developed from the knowledge transfer, IT implementation, and innovation diffusion literatures. The purpose of this study is to investigate how the knowledge transfer related factors, together with well-established influential factors in both IT implementation and innovation literature, predict and explain the success of ERP implementation, which is complex and impose high knowledge barrier. A cross-sectional survey is being conducted in China to empirically examine this model.