Characteristics of enterprise software

Abstract

Enterprise software is very complex and has an enormous impact on the competitiveness of enterprises. Many stakeholder groups are affected by enterprise software. To standardise and improve the communication within and among these stakeholder groups, a ‘morphological box for enterprise software’ was designed. Several iterations have been tried, the current version 5.0 is being released in this work. It comprises 5 feature groups with 19 features and 103 characteristics which were all derived from related work and/or feasibility, pilot and case studies conducted for this purpose. The morphological box is then applied to two ERP-software systems. This paper demonstrates that this approach is easy to apply, flexible to adapt to different needs and helpful to visualise the nature of enterprise software. The approach therefore enhances the description, classification and pre-selection of enterprise software. Future work should focus on deriving an improved range of characteristics for specific features.