Sensemaking with Narratives in Enterprise System Implementation Projects

Enterprise system implementation is challenging. The majority of implementation projects face severe issues, even total failures. The antecedents behind these issues and failures are related to collaboration issues between the implementation parties. The central parties include vendors, client organisations, and third-party organisations offering consultancy services. Each party makes a significant contribution to the overall implementation. The vendor delivers and manages the underlying packaged system. Client organisations take the new system into their use while aligning their processes with those of the new system. Third-party organisations offer their support to client organisations and vendors. Increasing the success rate of enterprise system implementations thus necessitates studying this collaboration. These issues are well-recognised. However, the reasons behind the collaboration issues are less clear. This dissertation explores a novel perspective for considering this setting—the narrative theoretical perspective.

A severe challenge in enterprise system implementation is the nature of these implementations. An enterprise system implementation is not the size of a human; it is a mix of abstract and concrete, depending on the interpreter’s perspective. Enterprise system implementations are thus equivocal. For the vendor, enterprise system implementation means that they deliver a packaged product to the customers. For client organisations, it is essentially a change project. For the users, on many occasions, it is a disturbance in their familiar environment. For third-party organisations, implementation lies between the aforementioned perspectives. Understandably, collaboration under such equivocal circumstances is complex.

Solutions for the collaboration issues in enterprise system implementations may be found in the way the implementation parties comprehend these implementations. This leads to the people’s main sensemaking form: narratives. By nature, people are storytellers who comprehend the world with narratives. A narrative is a sequence of particularised events that occur over time. Thus far, narratives have not been studied in the context of enterprise system implementation. This dissertation argues that the narrative theoretical perspective is valuable for studying and conducting enterprise system implementations.

This dissertation studies narratives in enterprise system implementations. The objective is to increase knowledge regarding this topic. The dissertation focuses on explaining the role, description, and influence of narratives in this context. It also considers a way to approach these narratives.

This dissertation uses an interpretive and qualitative case study approach. The case is enterprise system implementation projects in which collaboration issues and narratives occur. This dissertation studies two instances of such a case. In the first case, social and healthcare organisations are acquiring a shared enterprise system. They acquire the system from a large offshore vendor. A third-party project company manages the implementation. In the second case, a large global organisation in the retail industry renews its enterprise system. It decides to develop the system together with a small but familiar vendor. Both cases present significant challenges in their collaborations. These challenges generate severe complications.

This dissertation’s research data were collected via semi-structured interviews. The interviewees were the central actors in both cases. The interviews included discussions related to the interviewee’s perceptions and experiences about the implementations. The research data generated five peer-reviewed academic articles that comprise this dissertation.

This dissertation’s main findings show that enterprise system implementation parties make sense using narratives. These narratives are prototypical and possibly conflicting. The different parties, such as the vendor, the project company, and client organisations, resort to different narratives. For instance, the vendor and the project company may be making sense of the users’ negative feedback with a narrative that explains the negative feedback as simple change resistance – nothing to be shocked about. However, the users in client organisations may perceive a narrative in which a great disturbance is being forcefully fed to them in the form of an information system. These narratives have the power to generate collaboration issues in enterprise system implementation. Therefore, narratives in enterprise system implementations should be approached from a critical narrative perspective. This dissertation proposes initial, empirically grounded first steps that adopt such a perspective in both information systems research and practice. These first steps are grounded in prototypical narrative elements, which encompass the essential nature of narratives.

This dissertation increases the knowledge regarding narratives in enterprise system implementations. These findings contribute to information systems research and practice, organisation research, and narrative theoretical research.