Software and Organisations : The Biography of the Enterprise-Wide System or How SAP Conquered the World

The modern enterprise-wide information system has become a software package. A small number of software suppliers, of which the software giant SAP is the clear leader, have apparently succeeded in deploying their enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions across many different organisations, sectors and countries around the globe. Large organisations now appear to be dominated by a new breed of standardised software package. These are not the locally specific, tailor-made systems experts had predicted would prevail but the most highly generic kind of information system. This illustrates a significant shift - involving the reshaping of the corporate information system. How has this happened? How did SAP conquer the world with its ERP system? The received wisdom amongst social scientists within Science and Technology Studies and the Social Study of Information Systems is that such standardised solutions could only have limited applicability: there is no such thing as a 'one size fits all' universal solution. Given the diversity of organisations and sectors, they insist that generic systems can only work to the extent that they are adapted by user organisations through messy localisation processes. They cannot explain the success of packaged solutions. This book seeks to overcome this gap in our understanding of the origins of this kind of software and its extension to all sectors. It analyses the sophisticated strategies developed by suppliers to develop generic solutions, focussing upon the ways in which they manage their relationships with their current and potential customer base.This is the first book that addresses the genesis and career of the modern day enterprise system in a comprehensive and robust manner. It does so through setting out a new approach for the study of packaged solutions - the Biography of Artefacts Framework - and presents novel empirical studies based on in-depth ethnographic and longitudinal research conducted within supplier organisations, user fora and other relevant sites