Measuring enterprise systems success: the importance of a multiple stakeholder perspective

Abstract

Organisations invest enormous amount of resources in acquiring Enterprise Systems (ES), presumably expecting positive impacts to the organisation and its functions. Despite the optimistic motives, some ES projects have reported nil or detrimental impacts. This paper studies the proposition that the perspective of the stakeholders of an organisation may have contributed to the differences in receiving benefits reported in prior studies in this domain. An Enterprise System, unlike a traditional Information System (IS), entails many stakeholders ranging from top executives to data entry operators. These stakeholders (a.k.a employment cohorts) typically have multiple and often conflicting objectives and priorities and rarely agree on a set of common aims. The importance of gathering perceptions of success at multiple levels in organizations has been discussed among academics for several decades. However, there is no universal agreement on what employment cohorts should be canvassed (i.e. which are the distinctive employment cohorts?). This paper seeks to illustrate the importance of multiple stakeholder perspective in assessing ES success by analysing 456 responses gathered from 27 public sector organizations. The alleged differences in perceptions of organisational performance are empirically measured using a prior validated model, employing four constructs and thirty-seven measures. The paper identifies three key stakeholder groups in the context of ES and highlights the importance of measuring ES success from a multiple stakeholder view point.