Culture Isn’t Just a Buzzword
With ERP organizational change, culture ought not to be just a buzzword. It is a significant “thing” that can have a great impact on your ERP implementation readiness effort, and it deserves to be accessed and measured. Corporate culture is an elaborate system of norms and values that evolve over time and is the collective binding that governs the values, ideals, and beliefs shared within the organization (Ke & Wei, 2008). There are some great works that suggest the critical value of organizational culture specifically in the context of ERP implementation readiness success. For instance;
- “phenomenon at individual, group, organization, and society levels” can impact and determine the use of enterprise systems (Howcroft, Newell, & Wagner, 2004).
- And, Annamalai and Ramayah (2013) established that the organizational culture regulates the relationship between success factors and assimilation success of the ERP projects.
The importance of culture in the context of ERP success is well understood.
Measuring Culture
If organizational culture is so important, this means that we all should want to be able to measure and improve it. Right? The good news is that we can. We can “take the temperature” of organizational culture. Given the understood value of organizational culture upon ERP implementation readiness success, organizational culture research pioneer and expert, Dr. Dan Denison, explains that there are culture measures that can be examined when organizational change is being considered; “Every firm’s context or particular situation is unique, but one big consideration must be how well they understand the primary drivers of change affecting their specific business”.
Using Culture to Assess ERP Change Readiness
Therefore, an important question to consider is what kinds of culture measures might you need to consider to better assess your firm’s ERP implementation readiness? What is your ERP culture roadmap? Dr. Denison states that “research shows us that organizations can measure culture in a way that is useful to managers because it links culture with other bottom-line performance measures”. And, it is these bottom-line performance measures that are critical to ERP organizational change. It is important to get a strong sense of where an organization’s culture is prior to any significant change effort taking shape. Why? If you agree that culture is important to your company’s success, would you not want to know as much about the “ERP culture” as possible before investing your resources?
At Nestell & Associates, we turn organizational change culture readiness into something tangible and useful in the context of launching or rescuing ERP projects.