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The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of an Integrated Financial System implementation on accountant profiles in a Swiss public administration. The authors observe the following variables: accountants' skills, accountants' functions, and accountants' educational backgrounds. Each variable was studied before and after the implementation.

This study is an empirical research based on a case study using interviews. The authors designed a questionnaire that they discussed with participants in order to determine how they perceive accountants' job profiles.

The main finding concerned accountants' educational backgrounds. In the public administration that was studied, accountants tended overall to lack the specialized knowledge necessary to work with the complex tools in an Integrated Financial System. The paper also confirmed other authors' findings, that the necessary skill sets change when an Integrated Financial System is implemented. Actually, it was found that job descriptions did not change after the implementation as much as it was expected that they would.

These findings are based only on participants' perceptions, because documentation was difficult to obtain. The small sample size also did not allow for generalizable results.

Public administrations must carefully determine the skills necessary for the accounting staff to work within an Integrated Financial System. Job descriptions must be adapted and prospective new hires should have higher qualifications as well as better accounting and ERP knowledge.

This research was conducted using an ethnographic approach that compared and analysed perceptions from a diverse sample of government employees. The sample population was chosen from among different departments and functions.

The purpose of this paper is to adopt two different perspectives of an organization’s absorptive capacity, namely, the asset perspective and the capability perspective, to examine its impact on enterprise resource planning (ERP) assimilation. While prior IT knowledge represents the asset perspective, organization’s combinative capabilities – formalization, cross-functional interfaces and connectedness – represent the capability perspective of absorptive capacity.

The study develops a hypotheses-based theory of absorptive capacity. Data for hypotheses testing are collected from Indian organizations using a cross-sectional survey method. Partial least-squares technique is used to test the proposed hypotheses.

The results reaffirm earlier work showing the importance of connectedness and cross-functional interfaces in ERP assimilation; other two factors (prior IT knowledge and formalization) were not found to be positively related to ERP assimilation. To obtain more insights regarding the latter unexpected results, the study checked the interaction effect of the nature of company ownership (private or state-owned). The results pointed to the existence of a negative relationship between prior IT knowledge and ERP assimilation particularly in the case of private organizations compared to state-owned organizations.

Previous studies on ERP have predominantly examined the influence of absorptive capacity on ERP implementation outcomes at the user level. The present study focuses on absorptive capacity at the organizational level using two perspectives. By utilizing two perspectives on absorptive capacity, namely, the asset perspective and the capabilities perspective, it illustrates how different aspects of absorptive capacity can be brought to light while studying its impacts.

To provide background for senior and middle management in information technology organizations who may be in the implementation phase of compliance for Sarbanes‐Oxley (SOX). As the information technology (IT) organization looks forward to additional compliance or other IT control frameworks such as COBIT, the paper can help construct a roadmap. Other audiences include senior management, accountants, internal auditors, and academics who may wish to evaluate the impact of SOX on the information technology organization.

SOX is surveyed to understand the four major compliance areas that must be supported in the IT organization. Recently published works are integrated into an evaluation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) research to identity several ongoing themes that point to practical advice for implementing SOX. The private sector of US business is saturated with ERP applications and provides a useful benchmark of what to expect with SOX compliance. The sections of this report include: SOX and IT governance; ERP systems: recurring themes; after the initial implementation of SOX; frameworks to support SOX compliance; IT governance and SOX: where we go from here; to best practice and competitive advantage; and conclusion.

Competencies in several related core disciplines including project management, change management, and software integration should be the top priority for SOX implementation. Enterprise architecting and related areas such as security and outsourcing can be managed more effectively with the appropriate competencies.

The authors' observations are based on several research reports but are not exhaustive, and are not specific to a particular industry.

The content is a very useful source of information for senior management, IT management, accountants, auditors, and academics to understand the impact of SOX on the IT organization and how to develop a roadmap to respond.

Business process management has received much attention in the industrial engineering and management literature, and its benefits are well known. Much less has been written in the public sector management literature, and what has been written has been very general. Hence, there is confusion among public managers about how business process management concepts should be implemented. How should public organizations reorganize to accommodate business process management? How are existing or new enterprise systems aligned with business process management methodologies? This paper addresses these issues, and concludes that public organizations will have to change their organizational structures radically as well as their enterprise systems in order to implement business process management concepts successfully. The paper also discusses the benefits of public sector process management, and focuses in some detail on two of the reasons that public organizations have incentive to implement business process management methodologies.

This study aims to explore the influence of contingent factors on the assimilation of the cloud enterprises resources plan (ERP) system in the UAE’s public sector. It explains the relationship between institutional logics and institutional work while implementing ERP-based cloud computing (CC) to transform the government.

This study uses qualitative methods and an interpretive approach to provide an in-depth explanation for a detailed case study in the public sector. The institutional logics framework has been used to inform the integration between ERP system and CC in the public sector case.

Findings show that the UAE public sector could align institutional work processes with the inbuilt logics of ERP-based CC, resulting in successful assimilation of the cloud version. This study concludes that institutional pressures in highly institutionalized environments will generate organizational responses, but those responses are dependent upon and influenced by aspects of organizational culture. This study found that the organizational culture has led to a radical change by implementing the cloud ERP system and institutionalizing its usage toward transforming government. Moreover, ERP assimilation is the extent to which an organization has developed from understanding the ERP system’s functionalities to mastering and deploying them in their processes.

This study has important implications and contributions to the literature in three ways. First, this study examines an understudied topic, the interaction between CC and institutional logics. Second, this study contributes to the public sector research by providing a fine-tuned interpretation of the organization’s strategic behavior in response to a new information technology (IT) trend. Finally, this study also focuses on this new trend of CC which can influence the global IT industry, and it is worthy of being considered.

Explanatory case study research has a value to the public sector that one might be discovering new phenomena while analyzing the public sector case. The implementation of cloud ERP is one of the best methods of integrating technology with the public sector’s organizational, technical, economic, social, cultural and other environmental domains.

This study aims to explain the transformation process from using regular enterprise resource planning (ERP) system into implementing Cloud ERP system in the UAE public sector.

The study uses a qualitative case study and analyzes the primary evidences from in-depth interviews with the case organization’s personnel. It conducts a thematic analysis of the interviews’ findings. Furthermore, the study uses secondary and tertiary resources from published sources comprising the case organization’s website and previous studies.

The findings demonstrated that the transformation process to Cloud ERP could result in different practical benefits in an organization’s controlling system, cost reduction and profitability. Conversely, results revealed that the effectiveness of implementing cloud ERP is dependable on the provider’s professionalism; hence resulting in issues related to minimized organizational independence. In addition, the paper’s findings provide evidenced clarifications about the controversial misconceptions of Cloud ERP’s privacy issues.

The paper is exposed to the regular case studies limitations, as the study is a qualitative research studying one case company. Thus, the study findings should be strengthened by future quantitative researches on more companies with implying more statistical analysis.

The paper has important implications for practitioners and decision-makers, as it presents significant and reality-based information about Cloud ERP implementation’s benefits and drawbacks. It thus enhances decision-makers’ ability to make an appropriate and suitable decision about adopting the Cloud ERP in the public sector.

As Cloud ERP is still emerging, this study is one of the very few case studies that discuss and present some experienced benefits and issues related to Cloud ERP implementation in UAE Government. This study also uses transformation theory to analyze the data.

This paper examines the enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems of 27 European central governments and the governments' respective information technology (IT) reforms, facilitator role and association with accrual accounting reforms as premise of the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS).

This paper presents a qualitative and content analysis of 27 European Union (EU) member states (MSs) regarding the states' IT and accounting maturity in association with accrual accounting as breeding ground for IPSAS convergence based on published surveys on behalf of Eurostat, web data and emails collected from authorized officials.

This paper has found that (1) increased accounting and IT maturity scores of central governments are associated with the establishment or upgrade of ERP systems; (2) ERP systems prove to facilitate and support accrual accounting adoption; (3) in majority, EU MSs adopt similar ERP vendors to implement accrual accounting reforms; (4) with prevalence among ERP vendors, the Systems Application Products (SAP) ERP software proves to be a success story toward public sector accounting (PSA) reforms.

Respective information on the ERP systems' facilitation to financial accounting reforms is collected only for 17 central governments.

This paper highlights the facilitation of ERP systems as reform drivers to accrual accounting change of EU MSs, through IT modernization. This paper links the ERP practices with specific ERP vendors pointing out the vendors' similarities. This paper presents examples of European ERP reforms and sets the reforms as reference for central governments that wish to embark on ERP and accrual accounting reforms.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are complex and comprehensive software designed to integrate business processes and functions. Despite the difficulties and risk, the adoption of ERP systems is expanding rapidly. Universities make large investments in information systems and expect positive impacts. However, universities are facing serious challenges in implementing new technology. Therefore, this research aims to evaluate the impact of ERP systems on higher education (HE) from the perspective of stakeholders’ performance.

This research paper conducted a case study of an ERP system in a Saudi university to explore the impact of ERP system on the performance of the system’s stakeholders among the university’s employees.

The system quality factors (flexibility, compatibility, availability of right data, availability of currency, ease of use and timeliness) were found to affect performance positively, as were service quality factors (tangibility, reliability, responsiveness and assurance). This research further found that factors from pre-implementation, implementation and post-implementation phases had a direct effect on stakeholders’ performance.

Future research would be useful during the maturity phase to include all stakeholders in several Saudi universities. In addition, more research can be beneficial to test the applicability of the impact of the ERP system on stakeholders’ performance in other public sector organisations and in the private sector.

The results suggest that organisations in general and HE institutions in particular should focus on the early stages and the implementation phase if they wish to achieve high standards of stakeholder performance.

This research makes a novel contribution by attempting to evaluate the impact of service quality on stakeholder performance in the ERP environment. The contribution uses service quality as a dimension consisting of four factors – reliability, assurance, tangibility and responsiveness. All four factors were found to be significant on ERP stakeholders’ performance.

This study aims to explore the complex, multi-level institutional dynamics of smart city reforms and projects and their potential sustainability pressures on the implementation of a management accounting system in an Egyptian state-owned enterprise (SOE), which has a politically sensitive institutional character.

This study adds to institutional management accounting research using a multi-level perspective of institutional dynamics in the smart city context. Data were collected from an interpretive case study of an Egyptian SOE that was under socio-political sustainability pressures to implement a smart electricity network project in New Minya city.

Smart city projects have formed social and political sustainability pressures, which introduced the enterprise resource planning (ERP) network as a new management accounting system. A new (complex and multi-level) management accounting system was invented to reinvent the sustainable city as an “accounting city” (which appeared rhetorically as a “smart city”). “Smart” being the visibility and measurability of the sustainability performance of the collective body, which calls the city and its connectivity to different institutional levels brought out in a city network project for the ERP-enabled electricity distribution.

This study examines a single case study from a single smart city and identifies the accounting community’s need for multiple and comparative case studies to further analyse the potential impact of smart city reforms and projects on the sustainable implementation of management accounting systems.

City policymakers and managers may benefit from the practical findings of this interpretive field-based case study in planning, implementing and monitoring smart city projects and objectives.

Individual and collective well-being may be enhanced through new management accounting forms of multi-level local governance and increased political, field and organisational sustainability.

This study provides important insights into the sustainability dynamics of management accounting in achieving smart city reforms. The achievement of sustainability management accounting systems has connected to multiple ERP roles at different institutional levels, which resulted in accommodating the socio-political objectives of smart city projects.

After reading and discussing this case, students will learn to identify the content and context of enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation that is important from an operations standpoint. Through this case, student will discuss and evaluate the scenarios of ERP implementation arising from different deployment alternatives. Students will also learn to comprehend the case organization’s unique operational context and explore the challenges of introducing change into workplace environment and stakeholders’ overall expectations.

This case introduces students to the dilemmas of managerial decision-making that large companies face while implementing organization-wide technological upgrades, such as ERP. The case is set at a time point where ABC Mining Company – a large public-sector mining company – was trying to identify the most optimal ERP option based on its organizational structure and organizational processes. The information related to ABC’s organizational context included their business, structural and operational scenarios at the time. The information related to ABC’s stakeholders’ expectations reflected their perception about ERP and future implications. The information related to managerial conflicts reflected the understandings of the managers, in terms of need for ERP, needed skill to handle ERP and different types of ERP implementations that others have adopted. The case calls students for extensive analysis of the gathered information to identify and evaluate impacts and risks of all possible ERP alternates, and finally pick upon the most optimal ERP alternate. The case assumes a live 90-min class session conducted by an instructor. The instructor is recommended to assign the case to students for mandatory pre-reading before coming to class. The instructor is provided with a teaching plan to navigate the case.

The case is designed as an introductory case for an undergraduate or a graduate course pertaining strategic decision-making of ERP systems implementation.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy.