Business Drivers in Contemporary Enterprise System Implementations

The purpose of this study was to examine ES implementation business drivers in the new millennium and reflect on future directions for ES adoption. The study was designed to explore ‘typical’ implementations, where typical illustrates what is normal or average. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 key players in ES implementations, including ES vendors, ES consultants, IT research firms, and an ES hardware vendor. Two main issues, the implementation process and the organization, provide a framework to describe variations of typical ES implementations. Organization size, SME or large organizations, can be used to categorize two main types of ES implementations. Given that the ES market of large organizations is saturated, most ES implementations are in the SME category. The drivers behind SME implementations are: SMEs use core ES modules with minimum customization, ES vendors often manage implementation services, the number of users is around a hundred, and cost is below NZ$3 million.