Beyond critical success factors: A dynamic model of enterprise system innovation

Enterprise systems (often referred to as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems) can help organisations manage their key resources: money, staff, products, customers and suppliers, more effectively. Like many new technologies, ERP has been accompanied by vendor hype and stories of implementation failure. Work on critical success factors (CSFs) should encourage more appropriate implementation practice; however many CSF studies conclude with a list of factors but provide little further guidance. This paper presents a new model of ERP CSFs which draws upon existing work in IS innovation and on simulation ideas in order to better understand the relationships between CSFs and to encourage exploration of more appropriate implementation strategies.