行政院國家科學委員會專題研究計畫 成果報告
以科技之社會形塑觀點探討企業資訊系統實施之調適需求
研究成果報告(精簡版)
計 畫 類 別 ： 個別型 計 畫 編 號 ： NSC 98-2410-H-151-025- 執 行 期 間 ： 98 年 10 月 01 日至 99 年 09 月 30 日 執 行 單 位 ： 國立高雄應用科技大學企業管理系 計 畫 主 持 人 ： 朱培宏 計畫參與人員： 碩士班研究生-兼任助理人員：陳盈秀 碩士班研究生-兼任助理人員：吳詩雅 報 告 附 件 ： 出席國際會議研究心得報告及發表論文 處 理 方 式 ： 本計畫涉及專利或其他智慧財產權，2 年後可公開查詢中 華 民 國 99 年 12 月 29 日
行政院國家科學委員會專題研究計畫成果報告
中文題目：以科技之社會形塑觀點探討企業資訊系統實施之調適需求
英文題目：Adaptation Requirements in Enterprise System Implementation: A Social
Shaping View of Technology
計畫編號：NSC
98-2410-H-151-025-執行期間：98 年 10 月 01 日至 99 年 09 月 30 日
執行單位：國立高雄應用科技大學企管系
主持人：朱培宏
助理教授 國立高雄應用科技大學企管系
中文摘要
本研究闡述一個大型企業建構其企業資訊系統的十年過程。採用科技的社會行朔觀點 研究資訊系統調適需求是如何在全域結構與區域結構的互動中浮現出來。個案研究發現穩 定化與不穩定會形成循環，到達一個共識之前，不同類型的封閉型態會陸續出現，以達到 暫時的穩定，並得到一組凍結的需求。本研究透過這些暫時的封閉型態，提供對調適需求 進一步的了解。 關鍵字：調適需求、企業資訊系統、科技的社會形朔Adaptation Requirements in Enterprise System Implementation: A
Social Shaping View of Technology
Abstract
This study reports a case study of a large organization that has implemented and used enterprise resource planning systems (ERP) for more than 10 years. Adopting the social shaping view of technology (SST), the study aim at investigating how the adaptation requirements emerge from the dialectical interplay between the global structures embodied in the ERP and the local structures. The case study finds that there is a cycle of stabilization and destabilization. Before reaching a consensus, different types of closure emerge to end the dialectical interplay temporarily, leading to a frozen set of adaptation requirements. This study provides a better understanding for how and when the provisional closure (thus a frozen set of requirements) is opened, changed, and re-closed over time.
Keywords: Adaptation requirement; Enterprise system; social shaping view of technology
1. Introduction
When implementing ERP, the reconciliation of structural differences and conflicts between ERP and social organizations are critical but extremely difficult and costly. Consequently, it is important to understand how to end controversies and stabilize ERP to make ERP work . Since relevant social groups will define problems and solutions differently, their meanings in effect give rise to quite different artifacts, i.e. interpretative flexibility. As such, ERP closure involves the “disappearance” of problems of social groups as well as the stabilization of ERP. Prior studies tend to focus on one single phase such as ERP development or implementation. As a result, there has been little research on the evolution of ERP closure. This paper seeks to contribute to the literature on ERP closure by examine the following question: In what ways does ERP closure evolve over time?
We report a case study of a large organization that has implemented and used ERP for more than 10 years. Since our focus is on how ERP closure evolves over time, the social shaping view of technology (SST) is employed as the guiding theory for interpreting the case. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. We first develop the theoretical background for the paper, and then explain the research method. We then analyze the case and seek to draw some patterns of social processes that lead to several types of ERP closures. Finally, the paper’s implications are discussed.
2. Theoretical foundations
Several ERP studies based on SST seek to extend, clarify, and even challenge the concepts of “consensus”, “closure”, and “stabilization”. Central to these concepts is the idea that it is an agreement over the meanings of a technology among relevant social groups, which leads to the end of controversies and makes the technology stable. Prior studies suggest that (1) the rhetoric such as “best practice” may be detrimental to ERP adopters in terms of implementation and use because it limits organizational deliberate considerations about what they need, and what the package actually offers; (2) that there are national differences on the diffusion and applications of ERP in Europe, showing that European ERP adopters tend to embrace Fleck ’s concept of “configurational technology” in implementing ERP to satisfy specific contextual requirements; and finally (3) that ERP “parameter configuration” alone is not enough to cope with requirements emerge from user contexts, customizations are necessary and inevitable .
As a result, ERP implementation and use involve a process of blending the global and local structures . A range of options, social forces, and negotiations emerge during the process of embedding the global solutions into the application settings. A number of studies report that when implementing global large-scale technologies, the reconciliation of structural differences and conflicts are critical but extremely difficult and costly . There is dialectic between the global and the local . By dialectical interplay, colliding forces or contradictory values compete with each other for domination or control .
As the main research interests are to explore the dialectical interplay between the global solution (ERP) and the local structures. This research adopted an in-depth case study with interpretive approach since interpretive research can help IS researchers understand human thoughts and actions in social and organizational contexts . The study was carried out in a large multinational company (CF - a pseudonym), which purchases SAP-ERP in 1998.
3.1. Data collection and analysis
The interview of various key personnel was chosen as the primary data collection method. Among others, both open-ended and semi-structured interviews were used to collect data from 18 members of CF. Interviews were held with different roles at different levels and functions. The informants from IT include deputy director, ERP department head, ERP managers, and e-business department head. Totally 26 interviews were held, with an average session duration 1.2 hours. The seniority of interviewees was on average 12.5 years in CF that allowed the trace of who involved and how the SAP-ERP was implemented, rolled out overseas, and used under what circumstances. As Darke et al. suggest that data should be collected in various ways, a review of documentary evidence provided by the CF was also used to help contextualize and verify the interview responses. Such sources included proposals, evaluation reports, meeting minutes, and review materials.
4. Case description
CF was originally founded in 1980 as Taiwan's first semiconductor integrated device manufacturer (IDM). In January 2008, when the field work began, CF employed over 13,000 people worldwide and had subsidiaries in Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Europe, and the United States. CF began transformation into a pure-play wafer foundry in the middle of 1995. Its position as the foundry industry technology leader had been a major contributing factor to its rapid growth. CF now is one of the world-leading semiconductor foundries listed on Taiwan stock exchange (TSE) and New York stock exchange (NYSE), specializing in the contract manufacturing of customer designed integrated circuits (IC) for high performance semiconductor applications.
In 1998, the SAP-ERP had been chosen as one of CF’s enterprise applications. Employing an incremental approach to ERP implementation, CF used four tactics to its ERP deployment: implementing one or two sites at a time, forming core teams, hiring consultants, and limiting the number of modules implemented. The deployment of ERP in CF was a dynamic process characterized by temporal stability and change for over 10 years. Different social actors internal or external to the organization, technologies, and contextual factors interacted to establish and re-establish temporal socio-technical orders that shaped the ERP.
4.1. Phase one: the purchase of SAP-ERP without implementation (1998 - 2000)
It was the period that IT projects in CF were initiated under the conditions of (1) plenty of finance and human resource support; and (2) new information technologies and their implementations were
seen as innovation, and thus, were encouraged and enjoyed high autonomy in project accomplishment. The consensus to deploy the SAP-ERP suite was weak because the decision to purchase the SAP-ERP was made mainly by CFO Ricky. The rationales to purchase the SAP-ERP remained unknown to other relevant social groups.
However, Ricky quitted from CF in the May of 1998, three months after the SAP-ERP purchase. The SAP-ERP suite was put in the drawer after Ricky’s departure. Until year 2000, the SAP-ERP had disappeared from the eyes of CF. It exerted no influence on the local structures at all.
4.2. Phase two: partial implementation (2000 – 2001)
4.2.1. The formation of social alliance. In January 2000, CF completed the consolidation of five semiconductor manufacturing companies: three joint ventures and one acquisition. The number of employees worldwide suddenly rose from less than 3,000 to over 10,000. The explosive growth in organizational scale brought about huge information processing requirements with which existed organizational processes and information systems could not cope. As a result of such contextual conditions, a social alliance portraying to implement the SAP-ERP had emerged.
At the beginning of implementation, an off-site intensive SAP training for two weeks was given to the ERP core team. However, the effectiveness of training provided by the SAP Taiwan was not satisfactory. After the initial training, SAP-ERP consultants were on site. It was the intensive co-work that the two parties (i.e., the SAP-ERP consultants and the client) began to improve the understanding of what the package could do, and how the company did their business. For the strong user-oriented culture in the interactions between CF IT division and their users, users’ voices were often loud when engaging in negotiations for the gaps. As a result, in order to obtain agreement and support from diverse users, CF IT staffs and the SAP-ERP consultants allowed users to reproduce most of the local structures into the SAP-ERP through configurations, bolt-on, add-on, interface, and extended reporting.
4.3. Phase three: international rollout (2003 - 2006)
The worldwide unification of accounting processes and platform consolidation began on year 2003. Since all the accounting departments worldwide reported to CFO, the acceptation of the SAP-ERP closure was demanded. All overseas subsidiaries were the target sites. Senior managers again formed the ERP steering committee and the ERP core team. They did not employ full-time external ERP consultants this time because they believed that the ERP core team and the ERP department of CF had learned enough from previous implementation and operations. Instead, the consultant services were bought on an hourly basis.
The policy was to roll out the established SAP-ERP of CF Taiwan to the overseas subsidiaries. Under this policy, local customization was discouraged because the established closure was seen as the CF standard. However, the resultant overseas SAP-ERP was actually the derivation of the headquarters’ SAP-ERP because of the contextual differences between CF Taiwan and overseas subsidiaries.
Customizations, on the one hand, improved the fitness between the ERP and the company, while on the other hand too many customizations affected the integration and consistency, leading to several “efficiency burdens”. Because of the “efficiency burdens” caused by too many customizations, there was a significant mindset change in the technology use - from customization to embracing the standard. Meanwhile, ERP department also figured out that non-standard use created customization burdens, affected the system performance, and overloaded the ERP staffs. CF had decided to upgrade the current SAP-ERP and embrace the global standard. In this way, de-customizations work toward a similar purpose: to reverse the choices previously made.
5. Analysis & Discussion
The case study illustrated the provisional nature of closure because controversies and conflicts were not permanently closed, and might be closed temporarily by closure mechanisms other than consensus. In this case, closure by loss of interest, closure by compromise, closure by force, and closure by consensus formed successively temporal socio-technical orders. The recursive stabilization and destabilization cycle confirmed that an ERP closure was provisional . The CF case also shown that closure by consensus was not easy to attain, although it was the major closure mechanism proposed by Pinch and Bijker . As ERP closure is provisional and unexpected in nature, understanding both the change in the contextual factors and the interplay among actors were necessary for addressing how, why, and who were involved in the closure change over time.
6. Implications
The case suggests that taking a polarized approach (e.g., a vanilla approach versus customization strategy) in ERP implementation and use maybe impractical and problematic. A pure vanilla approach seems impractical because there are always local contingencies that the global technology can not foresee or cope with in advance. In the same vein, taking a customization strategy seems problematic as well because in doing so one may create another big legacy system that reproduces the dis-integrated social structures and decreases the benefits of process and data integration brought about by the ERP. In other words, while managers should escape from the rhetoric or myth of “best practices”, they also should be cautious to the organizational implications of customizations or technological drifts.
The first limitation of this study is the challenge to the generalizability, which stems from the adoption of detailed analysis of single case. However, the purpose of any SST study is not to pursue statistical generalization but analytical generalization. The point is to develop theoretical agendas and conceptual frameworks that transcend the individual case. Second, the retrospective nature of the study may result in incomplete or inaccurate data. Although numerous steps were taken to mitigate this concern, a longitudinal research design may be a better approach to avoid the retrospective bias.
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計畫成果自評
本計劃成果與原計劃內容相符，從科技之社會形塑觀點深入探討各個階段的調適需求 是如何產生的？其研究成果對於企業資訊系統在組織中的演進有更進一步的瞭解。幫助管 理者了解在各種社會參予者的互動中，資訊系統調適需求的浮現、妥協、實作、反轉與消失。 本研究成果亦發表於知名國際研討會。
出席國際學術會議心得報告
計畫編號 NSC98-2410-H-151-025 -計畫名稱 以科技之社會形塑觀點探討企業資訊系統實施之調適需求 出國人員姓名 服務機關及職稱 朱培宏 國立高雄應用科技大學企管系 助理教授會議時間地點 January 4, 2010 ～ January 7, 2010, Kauai, Hawaii, USA
會議名稱 Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2010 (HICSS 43)
發表論文題目 The Evolution of ERP Closure: Insights from the Social Shaping View of Technology 1、 參加會議經過 本人於2010 年 1 月 3 日到達夏威夷可愛島參加 HICSS 43 研討會。HICSS 是每年於 夏威夷舉行的國際系統科學研討會，也是國際級的資訊系統學術研討會中，非常重要的 一個會議。經常在一些頂尖的期刊上，看到這個學術會議中所選出的優良論文被收錄。本 人所發表的論文場次是在1 月 5 日，其餘的時間則參加不同主題的議程。由於 HICSS 有 來自世界各地的不同學者參與，討論的氣氛很熱列，在發表論文時得到許多寶貴的意見。 這次的會議議程，除了按照主題分不同的session 之外，比較特別的是也有許多研究方 法類的主題議程，其中有不少是與質性研究相關的。在與其他學者交流的互動中，發現 質性研究在資訊系統的研究中，似乎受到越來越多學者的重視。 在會議中也遇到許多國內的學者參與，顯示國內學者對於此類國際會議的參與度大 幅提高，其中也有研究生，相信對於國內研究的提昇有所助益。 2、 與會心得 在會議中也遇到許多國內的學者參與，顯示國內學者對於此類國際會議的參與度大 幅提高，其中也有研究生，相信對於國內研究的提昇有所助益。 參加此類會議可以得到論文上的許多珍貴意見，對於日後投稿至國際期刊，相當的 有幫助。
國科會補助計畫衍生研發成果推廣資料表
日期:2010/12/29國科會補助計畫
計畫名稱: 以科技之社會形塑觀點探討企業資訊系統實施之調適需求 計畫主持人: 朱培宏 計畫編號: 98-2410-H-151-025- 學門領域: 資訊管理無研發成果推廣資料
98 年度專題研究計畫研究成果彙整表
計畫主持人：朱培宏 計畫編號： 98-2410-H-151-025-計畫名稱：以科技之社會形塑觀點探討企業資訊系統實施之調適需求 量化 成果項目 實際已達成 數（被接受 或已發表） 預期總達成 數(含實際已 達成數) 本計畫實 際貢獻百 分比 單位 備 註 （ 質 化 說 明：如 數 個 計 畫 共 同 成 果、成 果 列 為 該 期 刊 之 封 面 故 事 ... 等） 期刊論文 0 0 100% 研究報告/技術報告 0 0 100% 研討會論文 0 0 100% 篇 論文著作 專書 0 0 100% 申請中件數 0 0 100% 專利 已獲得件數 0 0 100% 件 件數 0 0 100% 件 技術移轉 權利金 0 0 100% 千元 碩士生 2 2 100% 博士生 0 0 100% 博士後研究員 0 0 100% 國內 參與計畫人力 （本國籍） 專任助理 0 0 100% 人次 期刊論文 0 0 100% 研究報告/技術報告 0 0 100% 研討會論文 1 1 100% 篇 論文著作 專書 0 0 100% 章/本 申請中件數 0 0 100% 專利 已獲得件數 0 0 100% 件 件數 0 0 100% 件 技術移轉 權利金 0 0 100% 千元 碩士生 0 0 100% 博士生 0 0 100% 博士後研究員 0 0 100% 國外 參與計畫人力 （外國籍） 專任助理 0 0 100% 人次其他成果
