Cloud ERP Systems: Anatomy of Adoption Factors & Attitudes

Abstract

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have always been of interest to researchers across various research disciplines. Recently, the cloud computing paradigm has emerged to become one of most prominent technologies in business and academia alike. These new cloud accessibility and software delivery models have radically revolutionized the software market, especially ERP systems. However, while many vendors and software providers have adopted software-as-a-service (SaaS) models, few studies have explored the domain of cloud-based ERP systems – particularly information technology (IT) officers’ attitudes toward these technologies. Based on our review of literature and the relevant theories, we created a questionnaire and sent it to IT executives in Norwegian companies. The questionnaire captured the respondents’ perceptions of the benefits and disadvantages of cloud ERP. In general, the results confirm what has been reported in the literature. There were, however, some notable exceptions. One of the significant exceptions was the evident lack of data security concerns among the respondents, who ranked it as the least of their concerns. In addition, the promise of lowered total cost of ownership was not perceived as an appealing benefit, unlike what has been widely discussed in literature. Our findings show that respondents deemed vendor dependency and lock-in to be the paramount concerns of such cloud technologies, and system accessibility to be the significantly most advantageous. Finally, descriptive and inferential statistical analyses were conducted in this paper, and a regression analysis of the results was performed to identify the level at which the various benefits and advantages most affected our respondents’ attitudes.