Enterprise resource planning implementations within the U.S. Department of Defense: The effectiveness of department and individual programmatic governance in improving data and information environment quality

Within the private sector, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have been demonstrated as optimizing strategic benefits to enterprises. The benefits of these systems are derived from their ability to integrate functionally aligned legacy systems into end-to-end enterprise-focused processes and consolidate multiple data stores into single instances. These benefits have provided the foundation for ERP implementations to become transformational initiatives that have realigned organizational processes, making vertically aligned processes horizontally aligned. These transformational initiatives have improved the quality of data and information environments, providing data and information as enterprise assets. ERPs have allowed trading partnerships to be linked to integrated supply chains that have increased operating efficiencies. These demonstrated advantages have been the principal motivating factor for the Department of Defense (DoD) to expend a large portion of its IT budget on the implementation of ERP applications. Governance is a critical enabler of successful ERP implementations within the private sector. Similarly, the DoD has governance structures to oversee ERP implementations. This research sought to begin filling this gap in the knowledge by seeking a causal relationship between the DoD's ERP implementations, governance, and effects on data and system quality using a mixed methods approach. Because of an absence of grounded research, this project used an exploratory research paradigm to seek pretheory findings. Consistent with this paradigm, this project used the statistical approach of structured equation modeling for the quantitative phase, which supported the alternative hypotheses. The qualitative phase of this project used publicly available Government Accountability Office reports to compare ERP preimplementation conditions of data and information system quality with postimplementation quality. This research identified a positive correlation between the ERP implementations and the governance structure within the DOD, as well as emerging data on their positive effects on data and information environment quality. This research extended the framework grounded in private industry into the public sector of the DoD through the hypothetical model. Additional research must be conducted to establish theory from the basis of the pretheory work of this research.