SOCIOTECHNICAL MOMENTS OF ORGANIZATIONS TRANSFORMED BY ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING: THE CASE OF INDIVIDUAL WORK ROUTINES IN UNIVERSITIES

Abstract

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation drives nontrivial organizational changes that impact an individual’s work processes. This research maps out such an impact by means of a survey and in-depth interviews with employees of a large private university in Southern Brazil that has implemented a landmark ERP project. Eleven latent socio-technical factors supposedly describe ERP impact in universities – motivation, work standardization, information structure, managerial control, organogram, customer satisfaction, technological infrastructure, functions, user interface, productivity, and human development. Significant impact was observed in only four factors (motivation, work standardization, information structure, and managerial control), but the fact that the system was at its initial stages of adoption may have moderated the results. Given some unique attributes of the case under analysis (reported by the technology vendor as an international benchmark henceforth) and the research strategy that was adopted (qualitative investigation after multivariate statistics), the findings are quite original and of considerable importance to guide researchers and practitioners in understanding the organizational factors that may be affected by ERP implementation in universities.