Enterprise Systems Adoption And Its Influence On Flexibility

During past decades, enterprise systems (ES) are becoming increasingly popular. Companies often invest heavily in enterprise systems in the hope that these can improve their flexibility in coping with current dynamic environment. Numerous IS researchers have investigated the adoption of ES. However, most of them investigated ES adoption at the firm level rather than from a multi-level perspective. Moreover, previous studies have shown that the impact of enterprise systems on flexibility can be either positive or negative.To address above issues, this study aims to investigate factors that influence enterprise systems adoption with a multi-level framework. Furthermore, the study distinguish between process flexibility and organizational flexibility when examine the effect of enterprise systems on flexibility.This study reached the following conclusions. For the enterprise systems adoption, we found that a country’s uncertainty avoidance orientation has a positive impact on ES adoption. In addition, the positive impacts of firm size and technology competence on ES adoption become stronger with the increase in a country’s maturity of IT-related law. The study extends the TOE framework by using a multi-level perspective to understand ES adoption. For the influence of enterprise systems on flexibility, the analysis results show that enterprise systems have different effects on process and organizational flexibility. Furthermore, industry clockspeed sets a boundary for the effect of ES on process flexibility but not for the effect on organizational flexibility. Finally, research and practical implications of this study are discussed.