The human side of ERP implementations: Can change management really make a difference?

In the lead up to large-scale change bought about by enterprise system implementations, there are multiple complex influences at play that impact perceptions that the organisation might not be ready for the change effort. These influences manifest in uncertainty, ambiguity in roles and responsibilities and in many cases, information overload. Organisational change management (OCM) is often considered to be one of the most important success factors for enterprise system implementations and has even be referred to as a critical success factor. In this paper a definition of OCM will be proposed and outcomes of an investigation into the effectiveness of integrating OCM when implementing enterprise resource planning projects will be discussed. For the purposes of this investigation large scale enterprise resource planning systems were chosen as the software of choice to study. These systems by virtue of their complexity and implementation costs often cause long reaching impacts on the organization. Often to the point where organizations can wait for long periods of time to obtain any real benefit realisation. In this study 208 European organisations responded to a survey. Findings in brief indicated that experts who applied CM in their projects evaluated their projects as more successful than projects without CM.