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The purpose of this paper is to present an innovative agile methodology that proposes fundamental changes in managing the development of in-house information systems in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and benchmarks it with one of two database technologies enabling these systems to be both efficient and competitive.

The objectives are achieved by presenting an elaborated design of the agile methodology that manages the system development process by addressing three basic components: roles played by system players, process needed to fulfill the system development, and artifacts to document the project. A case study is conducted as a proof of the effectiveness of the proposed methodology and measures whether the selection of the database technology affects the effectiveness of the system development process.

Results show that, compared with traditional methodologies, the proposed methodology reduced the cost of system development and testing by 30 percent and enhanced the IT – business alliance. Further, this work found that the selection of a suitable database technology is strongly related to the complexity and interrelationships between the data used.

Such research did not receive the needed attention (Hunter, 2004) even in the past decade. Successful adoption of IT by companies could be in the form of customized IS which could be expensive for SMEs to adopt due to a lack in technical expertise and financial resources. The proposed methodology has the potential to promote sustainable development through helping SMEs in reducing the time and cost of IT project development.

Any manufacturing information system today must be able to both “reconfigure” and “reengineer” operations in a cost‐effective way. The objective of this paper is to propose an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system based on the re‐configurable characteristics of material objects (MO) and finance objects (FO). The implementation of this information system is based on the object technologsy concept, which composes enterprise applications in reusable software components made up of relevant manufacturing data. By analyzing the factors and the methods of integration of MO and FO, it can be shown that the proposed approach is more appropriate for the design and implementation of an ERP system, and that it is particularly suitable for small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). The results demonstrate a flattened organizational structure, better communication, and enhanced workflow reconfiguration.