Abstract

This paper focuses on the experience cycle of information systems in organisations (Markus, Tanis, 2000). This area of research has dramatically increased since the 1970s (Lucas, 1978), but still fails to present a unified approach (DeVaujany, Fomin, 2001). Although the current literature on IS implementation offers substantial results regarding various steps of the experience cycle; there is still a significant gap to fill regarding the understanding of the process as a whole. This paper contributes to the IS field, by considering the IS experience cycle, as a process composed by three phases (chartering, project and diffusion), which cannot be understood in isolation from each other. As an illustration, this paper uses a system dynamics model to understand the implementation and more specifically focuses on the case of Enterprise Resource Planning. The paper applies a coupled pair of simple differential equations to simulate a real organisation and successfully fits the model to the observed data. The model is able to predict the implementation time under various conditions and shows the necessity of not analysing the project and diffusion phases independently from each other.

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