Benefits Realisation; Change Management; Erp in Utilities

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are highly complex information systems. The implementation of these systems is a difficult and high cost proposition that places tremendous demands on corporate time and resources. Investing in enterprise wide systems is claimed as the key to delivering superior economic performance. Benefits Realisation from such IT implementations is fraught with difficulty. Indeed, the introduction of IT into work organisations is generally marked with persistent reports of underperformance and failure. Executive management tend to view the introduction of IT as an economic imperative while IT specialists tend to view it as a technical imperative. The coalescent nature of these two imperatives is such that the human and organisational aspects of IT related change are frequently marginalised and ignored. Achieving a more integrated approach to the implementation of IT is inordinately difficult since the narrow perspectives usually embraced by the Executive and IT communities do not naturally attend to change in an integrated manner. Literature asserts that many ERP implementations have been classified as failures because they did not achieve goals.