Ms Khawar Sultana¹, Sana Sameen Sabir², Dr. Nauman Shah³,
¹ Senior Research Associate, University of Management and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan, khawar.sultana@umt.edu.pk                                                                 
 ² Program Manager Under-graduate, University of Management and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan, sana.sabir@umt.edu.pk
⁴ Faculty of Information Systems, University of Management and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan, nauman.shah@umt.edu.pk                                                         
Corresponding author: Ms Khawar Sultana

Abstract

Digital transformation of firms needs to be brought in harmony with the pace at which technology is disrupting the industry. The initiative for technology adoption can better be taken with a commitment to develop the capability of reshaping the organizational resources. This competency is likely to influence successful conversion of such innovative technologies (InT) into business value. In developing countries, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) adoption is on rise; organizations are confronting technological, cultural and social factors which affect their capacity to succeed or fail in ERP adoption. The said factors are likely to influence organizational capability of integrating their resources into complementary relationships. To understand this, present study reports a qualitatively investigation of the cascading effect of these contextual factors which impacts the effectiveness of ERP implementation (hereafter ERPi) across its life cycle in two service organizations from private sector of Pakistan. Researchers took a grounded theory approach following critical realist paradigm to perform this study and found that resources, if integrated in complementary relationships, interact as a transformative measure and facilitate the intermediary outcomes to function as a part of the value chain of technology adoption. The explored CSFs were found influencing some important intermediary outcomes – functional alignment of ERP with business processes, users’ motivation to use ERP - which can reduce technical, analytical and operational risk factors at ERP post implementation stage.