IT-enabled cultural retooling: Identifying value and routine discrepancies during enterprise systems pre-implementation

Abstract

Cultural failings have been blamed as a major source of Enterprise Systems implementation failure; these derive from cultural misconstructions and resistance when IT is introduced. Cultural retooling has been conceptualized as an effective method for overcoming cultural failings in organizations. To achieve competitiveness and sustainability in a challenging environment, cultural retooling also enables competing organizations to translate external cultural resources into their own repertoire. To understand cultural retooling, we chose an ES pre-implementation in a Chinese state-owned manufacturer as the context of our study. For organizations to adapt a new technological approach, cultural retooling provides the ?image, sense and capacity? for a new cultural background and thereby updates and aggrandizes the organizational cultural repertoires. In this study, we aim to demystify cultural retooling by providing a concrete approach to identifying value and routine discrepancies. By identifying these discrepancies, organizations can encourage a congruent and compatible early attitude toward ES implementation.