Information Management in Modern Enterprise: Issues & Solutions 427 Do Organisational-Technological Contingency Factors Influence the Perception of ERP Systems Success? : An Exploratory Study in the Baltic- Nordic Region of Europe Princely Ifinedo, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland, premifin@cc.jyu.fi Abstract Firms worldwide are adopting enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Yet, few studies exist investigating the influence of organisational- technological contingency variables on the success of ERP systems. This study uses existing IS and ERP success evaluation models to investigate the influence of some of such contextual variables in two contrasting, yet similar, countries in Northern Europe. Case studies involving seven similar firms were used in the exploratory study. Findings indicate that the levels of ERP success perceptions appear comparable even though organisational- technological contingency variables differ across board. This would tentatively suggest that such variables are not significant in determining the success of ERP within adopting organisations. The implications of the study are discussed. 1. Introduction Across the globe, many organisations are adopting enterprise resource planning systems (ERP) [1, 10, 12, 18, 19, 38, 51 - 53]. Klaus et al [35, p 141 write “Usually, called [ERP], these comprehensive, packaged software solutions seek to integrate the complete range of a business’s processes and functions in order to present a holistic view of the business from a single information and IT architecture”. Firms that adopt ERP have been reported to have higher financial performance and higher market valuation than those not adopting ERP [22]. The ERP software market occupies a significant part of the total software package industry [1]. The global diffusion of these systems makes it crucial to study views from differing regions of the world. To that end, this paper presents empirical evidence relating to the evaluation of ERP success in some private organisations from two contrasting Northern European countries. Namely, Finland, which is an advanced country in the Scandinavia and Estonia, a developing Baltic country [8, 11, 59], are chosen for this study. Since ERP was introduced to the IS field in late 1990’s, a majority of studies on the subject tend to focus mainly on issues relating to its adoption, selection and implementation (see, [18]). However, recently, other studies deliberating the benefits, success, management, amongst others, are beginning to surface (see, for example, Shang and Seddon [51], Willis and Willis-Brown [58], Sammon et al [48], Spathis and Constantinides, [53]). The former signifies the first wave in ERP studies [53] whilst the latter deals with the second wave. We are interested in ERP success in relation to organisational-technological contingency variables. Herein, the term “organisational- technological” is used akin to Chau and Tam’s [9] usage in their research model. Therein, the phrase was used to refer to elements in the organisational IT infrastructure. Examples in these authors’ framework include the following: “satisfaction with existing systems”, “complexity of IT infrastructure”, etc. Here, we extend the phrase to cover other variables such as IS budget size, IS employees skill, etc. See Figure 4 below for detail. Furthermore, only a small number of studies has been conducted to study the influence of some of elements in the organisational-technological context vis-à-vis ERP success. The lack of studies in the area informed this current study. As such, this endeavour may be valuable to the IS literature with its contributions. The few studies researching ERP success tend to focus of the development of measurement models. Particularly, Tan and Pan [55] and Sedera et al [50] concerned themselves with developing ERP systems success models whilst Nelson and Somers [46] investigated ERP success from the user’s perspective using perceptual measures alone. This study, to some extent, draws from the work of Sedera et al [50] as we use elements in their model in our discourse. The Sedera et al [50] ERP success assessment model is validated and comprises both perceptual/subjective and productivity/objective measures (see, Grover et al. [20], Myers et al [44]). For the purpose of this paper, our definition of ERP success refers to the utilisation of such systems in enhancing organisational efficiency and effectiveness (see, [20, 39, 44, 50, 55]). We contend that both efficiency - relating to the quality - and effectiveness, which concerns the impact of ERP systems influence ERP success. Having said that, let us turn our attention to the objectives of this paper. We seek answers to the following questions: What qualities do our ERP-adopting firms associate with such systems? What are the impacts of such system on the adopting firms? How do these case organisations assess or evaluate such qualities and impacts? Then, we will use revelations from the foregoing questions to answer the core question of this study, which is: Do organisational-technological contingency factors influence the perception of ERP success in the adopting organisations? The rest of the paper is organised as follows: The next section presents the overview of the two countries as well as some insights on ERP issues in each. Next, the review of the literature is provided. The following section describes the research method used. Then, the discussion and conclusions sections are presented.