Murphy & Boland Enterprise Software Solutions DECISION SCIENCES INSTITUTE Enterprise Software Solutions: How Do Steering Committees Steer? (Full Paper Submission) Kris Murphy Case Western Reserve University kam31@case.edu Richard Boland, Ph.D. Case Western Reserve University boland@case.edu ABSTRACT Despite years of practice and significant cost, companies seldom realize the full benefit of an enterprise systems deployment. Despite their critical importance to a business, over 50% of enterprise system deployments are failures. This research identifies the factors that contribute to the performance of an enterprise systems steering committee as a governance and information processing body. Although steering committees play a significant role in guiding complex and costly enterprise software implementations, the performance factors leading to their success are not fully understood. This research finds that a steering committee is more impactful in deploying successful enterprise-wide solutions when it displays a multileveled, interrelated grouping of foundational, structural and action-based factors that take effect in sequence during the project. The foundational elements initiate the deployment, the structural factors provide an organizing logic, and the action factors are necessary for taking the project through to successful deployment. Sub elements for each of the three (foundational, structural and action) factors are also identified. KEYWORDS: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP); implementation methods; critical success factors (CSF’s); IT governance; critical failure factors (CFF’s); steering committee; enterprise systems; project performance; decision processes; configuration; business-unit committee; executive committee, information processing view. INTRODUCTION Efficiency and effectiveness are the primary goals of any corporation because they reduce waste and increase productivity; yet both remain tantalizingly elusive in many ways. The fields of information technology (IT) and enterprise solutions (ES) are major areas where this disparity is keenly felt; companies often spend large amounts of money without getting desired results (Chan & Reich, 2007; Rettig, 2007). This inefficiency may stem from any number of problems—both company-specific, as well as secular—so there certainly is not a one-size-fits- all solution for firms looking to address the issue. While research suggests that corporate governance in the form of enterprise steering committees is an important component of enterprise systems deployments, these groups are challenged by how to successfully