Moving ERP Research Forward: the Future Directions for ERP Research

This paper presents an unbalanced overview of existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) research by reassessing the body of knowledge and emphasising future research directions that need to be pursued in an attempt to fill knowledge gaps and bridge the existing gap between practitioners and academia. To fulfil this objective, nine leading international IS publications covering the period of 2006 to 2008 are explored to complement previous ERP reviews that have covered publications up until 2006. Fifty-eight articles and papers were identified from this sample. An ERP lifecycle framework (cf. Esteves and Pastor, 1999) is employed to analyse and organise the publications into two domains of interest to both practitioners and academia: namely, the ERP organisational perspective and the ERP managerial perspective. The ERP organisational perspective contains six stages according to the ERP lifecycle framework. They are adoption, acquisition, implementation, use and maintenance, evolution and retirement. The ERP managerial perspective includes various strategic issues related to ERP. The results of the analysis suggest a number of key observations from both perspectives. From the organisational perspective, the results highlight that there has been a heavy research concentration on the ERP implementation stage, and they also reveal that ERP use and maintenance, and ERP retirement remain somewhat un-researched areas. From the managerial perspective, the analysis reveals conflicting views on ERP advantages from different organisation levels, competitive advantage generated from standardised ERP packages and the concept of the 'unfit nature' of rigid ERP systems, tasks, and people. The fifty-eight publications reviewed can be considered to be the back bone of existing ERP knowledge, which can be used to further build knowledge that, in turn, can be of greater use and significance to practitioners.