Assessing and managing the benefits of enterprise systems: the business manager's perspective

TLDR

This paper focuses on the benefits that organizations may achieve from their investment in enterprise systems (ES). It proposes an ES benefit framework for summarizing benefits in the years after ES implementation. Based on an analysis of ES features, IT value literature, 233 vendor‑reported stories, and interviews with 34 managers, the framework lists benefits acquired through ES implementation and consolidates them into five dimensions—operational, managerial, strategic, IT infrastructure, and organizational—illustrated with perceived net benefit flow graphs. In a detailed example, the framework is applied to identify benefits in a longitudinal case study of four organizations. Abstract.

Abstract

Abstract. This paper focuses on the benefits that organizations may achieve from their investment in enterprise systems (ES). It proposes an ES benefit framework for summarizing benefits in the years after ES implementation. Based on an analysis of the features of enterprise systems, on the literature on information technology (IT) value, on data from 233 enterprise systems vendor‐reported stories published on the Web and on interviews with managers of 34 organizations using ES, the framework provides a detailed list of benefits that have reportedly been acquired through ES implementation. This list of benefits is consolidated into five benefits dimensions: operational, managerial, strategic, IT infrastructure and organizational, and illustrated using perceived net benefit flow (PNBF) graphs. In a detailed example, the paper shows how the framework has been applied to the identification of benefits in a longitudinal case study of four organizations.