Toward a foundation for analysing organizational roles in enterprise systems: A case study of a vendor

Abstract

Gaps between enterprise systems and organizations have long been of primary concern to both researchers and practitioners. While much attention has been paid to the fit of business processes, enterprise systems vendors have recently begun to focus on representing organizational roles in their systems as a mean of closing the gaps between system and organization. This paper presents findings from a case study of how a large enterprise systems vendor represented role-related concepts in its enterprise model and system with emphasis on role content and role relationships. A key finding from the study was that while the majority of role-related concepts were represented in the vendor's enterprise model, the implementation of roles in both the model and the actual system lacked support for remodelling and reassignment of the tasks contained in the roles. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.