Severity Assessment of ERP-Organization Misalignment: Honing in on Ontological Structure and Context Specificity

It has been estimated that at least half of all ERP (enterprise resource planning packages) implementations fail to meet expectations or achieve estimated benefits. In many cases, the misalignments between ERP features and organizational requirements have resulted in costly workarounds. In extreme cases, such misalignments have even contributed to project abandonment and organizational failure. One question that arises is why such severe misalignments have not been surfaced and recognized by organizations. Specifically, this paper proposes a framework that seeks to assess the severity of misalignment by critically examining the seductive universal best practices embedded in ERP. The framework is grounded theoretically on key ontological and context specificity concepts. We illustrate the framework by applying it to several hundred instances of misfits that we collected from multiple ERP implementations. We use the results of the analysis to shed light on the functionality “black box” of ERP misalignment.