22 nd Bled eConference eEnablement: Facilitating an Open, Effective and Representative eSociety June 14 - 17, 2009; Bled, Slovenia Constructing a Framework for Investigating and Visualizing ERP Benefits and Business Change Petra Schubert Centre for Applied Information and Communication Technologies – CAICT Copenhagen Business School, Denmark psc.caict@cbs.dk Susan P. Williams Discipline of Business Information Systems University of Sydney, Australia s.williams@econ.usyd.edu.au Abstract Realising business value and identifying the benefits arising from implementations of ERP systems remains a significant challenge for both research and practice. A review of existing work on ERP benefits reveals that current frameworks pay limited attention to contextual and temporal variations; socio-technical and business change; and levels of benefit realisation. This paper presents findings from an ongoing research project to develop a framework for investigating ERP benefits and business change, which addresses the identified limitations of previous research and provides a more detailed analysis of ERP benefits and their contextual variation. Using an iterative content analysis, the preliminary study presented here is based on 15 case studies. The final study will draw on data gathered from more than 60 case study organisations of differing size, maturity and industry sector. Keywords: ERP benefits, enterprise system, benefits framework, business change 1 Introduction Identifying, managing and realising ERP benefits and obtaining value from investments in enterprise systems is an ongoing challenge for research and practice. A recent survey of 625 CFO's identified that “achieving the expected benefits from IT investments” ranked as the second most critical issue overall for organisations of all sizes and was the most critical issue for large organisations (greater than $1 billion in revenue) (CSC, 2008, p: 14). The same survey reveals that return on IT investments remains an issue with 43% of respondents reporting low, negative or unknown returns (CSC, 2008, p: 17) and that only 40% of responding organisations perform post completion audits of major IT projects (CSC, 2008, p: 18). Organisations' failure to identify ERP benefits may be partly related to the level of information available to monitor performance; information quality was the most critical issue identified in the survey (CSC, 2008,