Closing the Blackbox? A Status on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Studies in Information Systems Research

Abstract

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are important generic software packages. With a long term development over 15 years ERP-systems have changed profoundly, and diversified into a number of applications. This contribution is addressing two major issues left aside in the research on ERP: the technological content and the time dynamics. Using two different small reviews of journal articles from IS journals it is developed that while IS research on ERP seem to deliver strong insight in user processes around ERP, it largely disregards the content of ERP, as well as the continual development that this content is undergoing. This means that ERP-research is disregarding the profound software changes and their impact on the user context, when implementing and operating ERP. Possible improvements of research approaches are presented.