Page 159 -

148 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP2) and Enterprise Resource Planning
(ERP) (Wallace and Kremzar, 2001). The generic term ‘Enterprise Systems’ is used
to describe, then, a range of ICTs that are designed to support workflows across an
enterprise. All are based on the same assumption about the importance and efficacy
of integrating and standardizing work practices for all types of workers.
The standardization of practices within an Enterprise System begins, so the
rhetoric goes, with the capture of knowledge of ‘best practices’. This is typi-
cally done by consultants working for software companies, and is based on their
interpretation and benchmarking of how particular types of work are performed
(e.g. the process of accounts payable or goods received) in what they define to
be leading firms. This knowledge of ‘best practices’ is then embedded in the
software packages that, when implemented in a given organization, will theoreti-
cally mean that the adopting organization acquires this ‘best practice’ knowledge
(Gratton and Ghoshal, 2005). This is because the Enterprise System controls
workflows by requiring data is input in a particular way and also requiring that
data move in a certain way across a work process. Such Enterprise Systems pack-
ages are thus marketed as knowledge processing systems – a way for any given
company to learn (i.e. acquire knowledge) to operate in the same way as the
very successful companies in their industry, since by adopting the package the
organization will be forced to reorganize its workflows to fit the work process
models in the Enterprise System.
This is why there is so much emphasis from Enterprise Systems software com-
panies, and the consultants involved in supporting implementations, on sticking
to a ‘vanilla implementation’. A ‘vanilla implementation’, as we saw in Chapter
3, means that the adopting organization should not customize the software to
support different work processes to those embedded in the software because, if
they do this, then they are losing the advantage of using the Enterprise System
to support their adoption of the ‘best practice’ knowledge. Typically, however,
there are configuration options which can supposedly accommodate important
differences between firms, for example, in terms of their structure or geographi-
cal and so language and legal environments. However, such options are to be
kept to a minimum so, in principle, when an organization adopts the Enterprise
System, they will supposedly be adopting ‘best practices’ as defined for their
particular industry. In this sense, context is not seen to matter that much, since
it is assumed that there are ‘best practices’ that are broadly applicable across a
wide range of situations. The problem with this underpinning notion of ‘best
practice’ is an issue that we will return to in Chapter 9 when we consider the
nature of innovation processes.
The central idea behind an Enterprise System is that there should be a single
database that stores data from across functions of a business (Gattiker and
Goodhue, 2005). For example, all sales data will be stored in the single repository
in the same format so that it is possible to integrate data from distributed sites as
well as compare data across sites. This, it is claimed, provides a powerful system
infrastructure for a business based on codifying ‘best practice’. For example,
in a consultancy organization a Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

6/5/09 7:05:10 AM
9780230_522015_08_cha07.indd 148
9780230_522015_08_cha07.indd 148 6/5/09 7:05:10 AM