An Extended Model of Decision Making for a Mindful Approach to IT Innovations (Enterprise-Wide ERP Project Implementation)

Overall, despite the strong push toward enterprise-wide ERP systems in the wider organisational community, there is, in relation to ERP implementations, a lack of understanding of the difficulties that can arise when organisations fail to ensure that all the required factors of success are present in their enterprise-wide ERP projects. Therefore, it can be argued that novel ideas for improved enterprise-wide ERP project preparation are needed. This paper provides a definition for the concept of organisational readiness and presents a method of practical relevance for organisational decisionmakers. This method for measuring organisational readiness uses a devil’s advocate workshop and embraces the concept of sense-making, in a pre-planning ‘intelligence’ phase of an enterprise-wide ERP project life-cycle. Therefore, organisational readiness is viewed as a ‘preparatory exercise’ with an intention to protect the implementing organisation from attempting to implement a solution for which they are not prepared. As a result, it is ‘common sense’ to assume that the organisation’s state of readiness for undertaking an enterprise-wide project, will impact on the actual outcomes of the project initiative