“Cultural Intelligence” During ERP Implementation: Insights from a Thai Corporation

Abstract

Much attention has been devoted to challenges related to ERP implementation. However, there is a wealth of papers that are focusing on cultural issues related to ERP depending the country they are implemented. The objective of this article is to analyze and to illustrate how project managers achieve ERP implementation whereas users face cultural changes concerning the way new tasks and business processes must be done? It differs from the perspective considering IT adoption as depending primarily on IT characteristics and organizational needs. We posit that ERP acceptance/resistance cannot be reduced to use behaviors taken at face value but that they must be analyzed considering their underlying cultural dimensions. The case study was done at Eastwater, a corporation in charge of water distribution across Thailand and that succeeded into implementing SAP in only one year. The semi-structured interviews done with project managers and consultants of the company reveal how cultural values shared by employees were used as change management vectors, showing for example how the project director used the Bunkhun values to legitimate the ERP adoption and force users' acceptance of the ERP. The result can help managers to better deal with observed misfits between organizational values and IT project, so that it does not ultimately become an obstacle to user acceptance.