Draft of Introduction from: Neil Pollock and Robin Williams (2009) Software and

Organizations: The Biography of the Enterprise Solution Or How SAP Conquered the
World, London, Routledge.

i
Introduction: The Reshaping of the Modern Enterprise
Solution

November 1990: The Hague. The UK Science and Engineering Research

Council (SERC) sent one of its leading experts to an international workshop
organised to discuss the future of the computer systems used to run industrial
enterprises. The workshop was one of a number organised in Europe and the
USA that year to assess the prospects for these technologies that were seen as
constituting ‘best practice’ in manufacturing organisations and crucial for
industrial competitiveness.

The workshop, organised by The Eindhoven Group, widely regarded as the

‘leading research group in Europe’ on these technologies, attracted a strong
and interdisciplinary turnout, with over sixty consultants, technology vendors,
users and academics, coming together to discuss its provocative ‘rationale
document’. Gerry Waterlow (consultant to SERC’s Application of Computers
and Manufacturing and Engineering Directorate) circulated a report, drawing
attention to the consensus that appeared to have been reached around the
central argument advanced by this document. He suggested that these
conclusions could probably be regarded as a ‘reasonable snapshot’ of the
direction in which the particular technology they were all there to discuss was
moving. It was even suggested that – such was the consensus - the workshop
itself might help to underwrite this future direction since many of the actors
central to its shaping were present in the room.

The technology under the microscope was the state of the art of what we today
would call Enterprise Resource Planning solutions – known then as
Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP) systems. In the late 1980s, MRP
technology had been heavily promoted as a solution suitable for a wide range
of organisations. However the title of the workshop - ‘Beyond MRP: MRP and
the Future of Standard Software for Production Planning and Control’ –
made it clear something was afoot. One did not have to read too far into the
workshop rationale document to see the sting:

1
 The development of MRP (I and II) has led […] to a specific
production control philosophy [as well] as to standard software for
production control. Control philosophy and standard software are
heavily intertwined. Having standard software for production control
is very important in practice, as well with respect to the whole
implementation and training process as with respect to maintenance.
On the other hand MRP (philosophy and software) seems not to fit well
everywhere (Workshop Rationale Document, no page no.).

The workshop had been motivated by growing concerns that this latest breed
of enterprise system was proving problematic. Users, it seems, found these
systems ‘difficult to apply’ and as a result, they were ‘not widely adopted’.
Some of the difficulties experienced concerned their ‘generic’ nature and it
was generally perceived that the processes embedded in the software were
‘too rigid’ for most adopting organisations. Indeed, The Eindhoven Group
saw the workshop as a means to ‘debate the reasons’ as to why this was, as
well as to ‘identify ways forwards’. They concluded that it was ‘…time to
discuss the future of standard software in general and more specifically the
future of MRP’. The workshop put forward ‘three scenarios for MRP
development:

i) gradual evolution of generalised MRP with the existing software

suppliers remaining the major vendors;

ii) increase in user-driven special versions of MRP for particular

industries, leading to partnerships between users and smaller suppliers
concentrating on vertical markets;

iii) decline in significance of MRP [to be replaced by] Factory

management systems, supplied by system integrators with a broad
range of skills (systems, software, communications, automation)
[which] will take over MRP2 functions’ (Waterlow 1990: 2).

2
 The conference background paper (Wijngaard 1990: 5) described the latter as
the 'more radical scenario, and one for which there is substantial evidence
that new ideas are emerging from outside the MRP world’. Concepts such as
Just-In-Time and Computer-Integrated-Manufacture would, it argued, be
‘captured better by Factory Management Systems rather than MRP’.
Moreover:

[t]he special needs of industry sectors cannot be met by a generic MRP

system, and different methods will emerge. These developments are
being made today partly by a new group of ‘systems integrators’ who
have stronger technical skills in systems, communication, automation,
and new software technologies. In this scenario the structure of the
software industry is likely to change as new suppliers appear (ibid.: 5).

During the workshop, there was the general feeling that the current direction
of the enterprise system was not sustainable. ‘The majority [present at the
conference] considered MRP2 in the form of standard software as an
unworkable concept’ (ibid.: 4). The future as they saw it was not with generic
software packages but instead there was an ‘urgent need’ for alternative more
‘context specific software packages’ (ibid.: 6). Intriguingly, the workshop
deliberations showed little awareness that waiting just around the corner was
a new breed of software supplier that would herald in a very different future
for the enterprise system…

The modern enterprise-wide information system has become a generic software

package. A small number of software suppliers, it seems, of which the German-based
software company SAP is the clear leader, have succeeded in deploying their
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems within and across many different
organisations, sectors and countries around the globe. Large corporations and
organisations throughout the world now appear to be dominated by a new breed of
standardised packaged solution. How has this happened? Indeed the fact it has
happened at all is remarkable when one considers only two decades ago leading
experts and practitioners agreed that the future for organisational information systems
was not with generic IT solutions. Back then, and based on experience with the state-

3
of-the-art integrated enterprise planning solutions of the day, many experts considered
it highly unlikely that a small number of generic information systems could meet the
needs of organisations within and across sectors (Waterlow 1990). These systems
were seen as too standardised for the complex and diverse needs of adopting
organisations (which, as they saw it, required alternative and more flexible, locally
specific kinds of solutions). Thus, the future for technology supply was seen to lie
with vendors developing varieties of sector specific offerings that could be locally
adapted to the various particular user organisations seeking to apply them.
Discussions of sectoral difference and organisational uniqueness were the order of the
day and ‘semi-generic’ and highly tailorable packages were seen to be the way
forward.

However, whilst the ‘structure of the software industry’ has changed this is not in the
way predicted by The Eindhoven Group. Despite their assessment at the 1990s
workshop, a new breed of software package supplier has emerged which has managed
to reuse and recycle highly standardised systems into thousands of different
organisations. These packaged solutions now make up a substantial part, perhaps the
majority of organisational IT expenditure (Jakovljevic 2001) and include, as well as
ERP, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management
(SCM) and other financial and administrative systems. The extension of the generic
package into organisations worldwide is all the more remarkable when one considers
that not only was the phenomenal success of suppliers like SAP ‘not on the radar’
during the workshop but the vision for the direction of these systems was far removed
from what we have today. However, before the end of that decade, SAP’s now
famous ‘R3’ package, followed by other suppliers of similar generic software
solutions that have became known as Enterprise Resource Planning systems, would
have swept through major corporations in Europe, the USA and beyond, moving out
from manufacturing into services and the public sector. This poses the following
questions: How has this happened? How has this new breed of supplier been able to
extend their systems into organisations worldwide? Moreover, what does this mean
for the character of the organisational information system and wider arena in which
they are situated?

4
What is clear from the rise of these kinds of solutions is that the nature of the modern
enterprise system is changing. Not only have these new suppliers recycled their
technologies into many different places but, arguably, in doing so, they have heralded
a shift in the conception of the organisational information system. What is at stake is a
profound change in ideas about the very notion of the modern corporate solution: this
encompasses how they should be developed and implemented as well as the extent to
which they should address particular sectoral and organisational requirements.
Clearly, these new kinds of systems have important implications for researchers
interested in the technology and organisation relationship. How are we to respond to
the rise of this new breed of software supplier and the extension of the generic
enterprise system in a sensible and comprehensive way (i.e. without either inflating or
reducing these changes)?

However, despite the fact these kinds of standardised packaged solutions account for
the bulk of systems used today, we cannot in a conceptually and empirically robust
manner explain their rise to prominence. We do not know precisely how the modern
corporate system became a generic package. Though practitioners may advance well-
rehearsed ‘potted-histories’ of this artefact there are very few studies of the
origination and design of these artefacts, let alone research which addresses the
evolution of this technology along its protracted lifecycle. These kinds of IT systems
have had nowhere near the kind of sociological attention they deserve. Why is this?

One reason is that the received wisdom amongst many scholars interested in the social
study of technology would be that generic solutions only have limited applicability:
for some, there is no such thing as a ‘universal’ or ‘one size fits all’ solution (Star &
Ruhleder 1996; Hanseth & Braa 2001). Standard systems only work to the extent they
are adapted by user organisations through messy localisation processes. Thus,
according to many sociologists it is ‘users’ and ‘adopting organisations’ that should
be studied. Whilst, on the one hand, we share their interests in implementation it has
also meant that, on the other, recent research on information systems has become
somewhat unbalanced. In focusing principally upon user organisations, social
scientists have not adequately conceptualised and analysed standardised information
solutions. There is not, for instance, a comprehensive understanding of the inner
workings of the leading software supplier organisations. Nor do we have a

5
sophisticated appreciation of the wider information system industry dynamics that
surrounds software producers. This is reflected by the lack of frameworks that explain
the extension of these systems across sectors and this wider shift from specialised to
generic software. Let us briefly look at some of the dominant ways these technologies
are researched.

The current social science research on packaged enterprise systems is broadly

gathered around two opposing poles. The first, typified by more managerially focused
kinds of analysis, views ERP systems and the like as more or less ‘transformatory’
technologies containing ‘universal logics’. They imply that because of the nature of
their design these systems can be applied extensively across all kinds of corporations
and bring about widespread change (see for instance O’Leary [2000] and Bendoly and
Jacobs [2005]). Not surprisingly, this view has been seen as problematic by critical
social scientists. Thus, a second pole has subjected these discourses of transformation
and universalism to critical assessment. In what might broadly be characterised as the
‘Social Study of Information Systems’ (McLaughlin et al 1999; Ciborra 2000;
Walsham 2001; Sawyer 2000; Avgerou 2002) scholars have advanced alternative
accounts of the spread of these solutions. Many have produced what might be
described as ‘situated’ and ‘localist’ explanations, often drawing on the
groundbreaking work of Suchman (1987) as well as ethnographic study (see for
instance Knox et al. [2005]). These accounts typically contrast the uniqueness in
structure and practices of user organisations with the standardisation of packaged
solutions, and have tended to emphasise the ‘contingency’ surrounding the
implementation of these systems (Hanseth et al. 2001).

However, whilst this literature is highly informative, it also tells us rather little about
what we regard as one of the most important developments in the short history of
corporate information systems: the shift from locally specific to generic systems.
Scholars in the Social Study of Information Systems, for instance, have thus focussed
selectively upon certain aspects and moments of the software package life cycle and
as a result, they offer what have now become well-rehearsed but also highly partial
accounts. Critical social science should be able to give a more comprehensive analysis
of the reshaping of the modern corporate system. Not to do so has risks - handing the

6
terrain to other disciplines.1 This has meant that the debate around enterprise systems
has been unevenly developed and unhelpfully fragmented between rather narrow (e.g.
managerial or technical) perspectives. Of course, every failing is also an opportunity,
and the gap that exists in our current understanding is also one we hope to fill (at least
in part) with this book.

RHETORICS OF TECHNOLOGY SUPPLY

Today, few can deny that packaged highly standardised forms of enterprise solutions
have become an important feature of our organisational landscape. In this respect,
Management scholars have been prolific in celebrating their various features and
characteristics. Daniel O’Leary (2000), for instance, goes as far as describing systems
like ERP as nothing less than a ‘corporate marvel’. They have undoubtedly had an
enormous influence on the business and information system worlds, he argues,
affecting each of the following dimensions. They have experienced a huge market
growth, being taken-up by most of the major corporations around the world. They are
also now increasingly being rolled out within small and medium-sized enterprises.
Moreover, within corporations they have been used as one of the primary tools for re-
engineering the organisation as well as the diffusion of many best practices.

Added to this, there is also the (mostly implicit) assumption that they have heralded in
a new class of computer solution (Klaus et al. 2000). This, firstly, is the suggestion
that the ‘generic-ness’ of these solutions is an achievable design issue (Carey 1998).
In addition, that these solutions can be ‘recycled’ across similar classes of
organisations (Deifel 1999). This can be within the same or related industrial sector or
as is now increasingly common across different and unrelated sectors and
organisational forms. Secondly, and in stark contrast to the organisational information
systems that went before, these systems are now generally thought to behave like
‘products’ that can be selected and purchased as with other kinds of commodities
(Deifel 1999; Heiskanen et al. 2000; Regnell et al. 2001; Xu and Brinkkemper 2005).

There are of course aspects of this brief account that deserve to be challenged. One of
which is that enterprise systems were not simply borne ‘software packages’ or
‘generic solutions’. Rather, something had to be done to them to achieve their
‘generic-ness’ and ‘commodity’ status. It is notable that Management research

7
provides very little, whether in terms of empirical findings or conceptual frameworks,
that will afford an adequate understanding of this ‘something’. This is true amongst
even the more highly regarded of works – such as Davenport (2000b). In terms of the
first point (‘generic-ness’) this literature tells us almost nothing about how the
suppliers design and develop these systems and products or on what they base the
design of generic solutions? We understand very little about how different suppliers
manage the tension between designing systems for a specific user and for a wider
market. This is important whether a package is being redesigned from a generic to a
niche specific solution or whether it is being recycled from one sector to another or
‘upgraded’ from custom built software to a generic system. In terms of the second
point (‘commodity status’) we have little understanding of just how software
packages are typically presented to potential adopters. This includes the different
strategies and decision-making processes of those adopting software packages (the
process by which users assess and make sense of the wide range of alternatives and
options available). This is whether to procure one of the more generic of systems on
offer or a more flexible ERP alternative. On one hand, it is acknowledged that
organisations find it difficult to critically assess and evaluate the range of packages on
offer. Moreover, there is a growing awareness of the costs of ending up with the
‘wrong’ solution and this is provoking uncertainty among user organisations. Yet, on
the other, this appears to have done little to deter the uptake of packages. Other
considerations and actors are obviously at work here.

One of the other problems of the Management literature (including Davenport) is that
it tends to be based on a particularly weak empirical base. Rather than study actual
technologies, these writers tend simply to align themselves with the statements and
rhetorics of technology supply. We therefore turn to other disciplines within the social
sciences, where these criticisms apply less, and where there are numerous frameworks
available to trace this development (although none appear fined tuned enough to
analyse the ‘biography’ of the generic solution in the way we think necessary). And
which over recent years they have amassed an enormous amount of qualitative and
particularly ethnographic research data.

8
REACTION AGAINST PACKAGED SOLUTIONS
The Social Study of Information Systems is made up of work from scholars within
Science & Technology Studies (STS), Information Systems (IS) research and
Organisation Studies.2 In the face of often quite deterministic and supplier dominated
debates, researchers from these approaches were among the first to characterise the
complexities and difficulties associated with modern packaged information systems
(see Lucas et al. 1988; Webster and Williams 1993; Salzman and Rosenthal 1994).
Much of this ‘critical project’ has grown up in opposition to the more dominant
supply side accounts. Thus, it is no surprise this work predominately focuses on the
struggles adopting organisations engage in whilst attempting to make generic and
standard systems work within their user settings. There have been many studies now
showing how packaged systems seldom translate (or translate easily) across
boundaries, whether these are between organisations within the same sector, between
industrial sectors, or between public and private sector ones (Pollock & Cornford
2004). The difficulties in developing solutions that can be widely applied result, it is
commonly argued, from the diversity of organisational settings and the resultant gulf
that exists between the system and the specific contexts, practices and requirements of
particular user organisations. Indeed if generic packages do work across settings, this
would, under these perspectives, be seen to be only at great expense to the adopting
organisation (in terms of adapting the package and prejudicing the benefits of
standard solutions or imposing unwanted organisational change in order to meet
presumptions built into the package). Indeed there is now a large (and rather
interesting) literature on cases of failure, implementation difficulties, and on the costs
and risks associated with adopting these systems (Scott and Vessey 2002; Newman
and Westrup 2005; Wagner and Newell 2006).

Yet, if we are to view this literature a little more critically, when reading some of
these studies it is a wonder these systems extend at all. The latter sets of arguments
are pursued with such vigour – there is such a desire it seems to demonstrate the
complex organisational and technical reworkings necessary to sustain packaged
software – that there appears to be an entrenched scepticism with regard to their wider
applicability (Soh et al. 2000; Scott and Wagner 2003; Soh and Sia 2004). For many
social scientists, especially those informed by sociology and anthropology, the large
software suppliers like SAP should not be successful. Sociological/anthropological

9
theory tells them that organisations are too diverse to deploy these highly generic
kinds of systems. Many studies therefore end up suggesting - based on difficulties and
complications witnessed during fieldwork - that ERP systems and the like have no
more than limited potential for extension. How could the same or similar (or even
slightly adapted) organisational IT system be applied across many different types of
organisations with all the diversity and heterogeneity found there (Soh et al. 2000;
Soh and Sia 2004)? In addition, to support these assumptions, we are introduced to
various explanations (and a growing vocabulary) as to why these systems should not
work across settings.3 Related to this, many accounts of package implementation
describe how these solutions if not completely failing appear constantly on the brink
of failure (in this respect see Constant’s [1999] critique of tendency within STS to
over emphasise technological breakdowns). In short, it appears that within the Social
Study of Information Systems there are (implicitly) a powerful set of objections
advanced towards generic enterprise solutions. Sociologists interested in the
technology and organisation relationship have looked in one direction only, through
what we would argue is an inappropriate theoretical lens, studying reworkings rather
than extensions, with the upshot that many of their assessments now sound rather
reminiscent of The Eindhoven Group.

Although this work was a useful corrective to the more dominant supply side view,
today, it now appears incomplete. It is advancing a fairly reductive analytical schema
(and one it must be said that tends to produce rather familiar sounding stories). If we
are to answer the questions set out above, which as scholars interested in the social
analysis of technology we must, then the current approach by itself is no longer
sufficient. We ourselves have been ‘guilty’, if this is the right word, of advancing
such arguments. Williams, for instance, strongly concurred with the consensus back in
the 1990s that the future was not with generic packages. Likewise Pollock
problematised the transfer of ERP within the public sector suggesting, based on
observations during ethnographic fieldwork, that these systems would be ineffective
for these very different kinds of organisations. We both presented what were accurate
‘snapshots’ at that point in time but also ones that some years later, and with the
luxury of resources/time to revisit fieldwork settings, we realise were very much only
a ‘partial picture’.

10
One of the reasons why the social analysis of technology generally and the Social
Study of Information Systems specifically has not adequately conceptualised and
studied these technologies is intellectually deep rooted. Scholars interested in the
technology and organisation relationship have been highly influenced by
constructivist, interactionist and, especially more recently, Actor Network Theory
(ANT) accounts. However, we would argue these are not adequate to study packaged
systems - especially in light of their increased commodification, globalisation and
‘generification’. Our main point of contention is the emphasis these approaches bring
towards local ethnographic studies and micro-sociological concepts (but see Knorr-
Cetina and Bruegger [2002] who develop micro-sociological concepts for studying
global phenomena). Whilst highly effective in producing rich local pictures, that is to
say capturing the various struggles and choices around the design or (more frequently)
the implementation of new technologies, they also tend to provide a rather
reductionist form of analysis.

Certain kinds of study and situation have become the norm in our discipline (and
given undue emphasis). This is the ‘ERP implementation study’ and within this
attention is given to immediate action and ‘heroic’ local actors, for instance, who
appear able to create and recreate their organisational world almost from scratch (a
form of work that often includes the large-scale reworking of the newly implemented
information system – see for instance Scott and Wagner [2003]). However we are not
wholly convinced that most useful way to study these artefacts is solely at the place
where the user encounters them (Kallinikos 2004a,b). This view is inherently
problematic when one considers that with software packages we are dealing with a
technology that was developed at some distance from it place of use. In this respect,
the emphasis on local studies of adoption offers an inadequate lens for exploring the
development and influence of complex organisational technologies like ERP (that
exhibit very different dynamics to traditional software systems or, for that matter,
other kinds of organisational technologies). We do not think it sufficient to analyse
the extension of the software package by reducing explanations to simply local action
and contingency or in terms of the victory of the local over the global – or vice versa.
Existing studies both downplay the influence of technology supply and often overlook
the influence of the broader historical setting on the unfolding of the technology.

11
Thus, we argue that we need different approaches to explain the rise of the modern
enterprise system.

Indeed the lack of research around the topic is one of the reasons we have chosen to
subtitle this book in this provocative manner (‘How SAP conquered the world’). Let
us briefly explain. Firstly, this is not a book specifically about the large global
supplier SAP (it is not the ‘history of SAP’ though such a study is long overdue) but a
more general account of the new breed of software produced that has recently
emerged. SAP, and a number of its competitors, notably Oracle, have been the
principle actors heralding in the new kind class of software package known as the
ERP system.4 Secondly, there are many who might take issue with the word
‘conquer’, which suggests the winning of a battle or victory of some sort. This is not
what we intend here. We do not believe this new breed of software supplier has
simply waged a war and emerged successfully. This is far from the case. Rather we
use the term primarily as offering a counter to current biases within the Social Study
of Information Systems towards localisation arguments, to encourage social scientists
to offer alternative explanations for the rise of this new class of technology. It is in
this sense we hope the title and the book more generally is read.

AIM OF THE BOOK

To this effect, we see the book as a means to redress the imbalance that has developed
in the social analysis of technology through encouraging a shift beyond the
implementation study to study the ‘career’ of artefacts in their historical context and
along the full length of their life cycle. This includes studying enterprise-wide
software applications across their ‘software’ and ‘product’ life cycle. It is only
through tracing what might be called the ‘biography’ of the modern enterprise system
and observing this biography from multiple viewpoints and timescales that we can
begin to understand how this kind of software package has emerged. It is interesting
to note that, despite the fact that the packaged enterprise system has been around for a
few decades now, that there are still far too few specific sociological concepts to
capture the various interdisciplinary issues surrounding generic and commodified
solutions, even though some scholars have acknowledged the stark difference
between this and bespoke software (Sawyer 2000, 2001). There is no sociology of the
packaged software solution. Much discussion seem content to borrow or recycle terms

12
from other fields: from the discipline of Information Systems itself whose terms and
concepts have emerged from the study of different kinds of technology (for instance
bespoke software development); or from anthropology and cultural sociology both of
which exhibit particular ‘disciplinary biases’ constricting our view of these systems. If
we are to be serious about studying the specific dynamics and lifecycle of generic
packages as both software and product then we arguably require a more specific
framework to do this. This should build on as well as provide a critique of existing
social science accounts of technology. It is this that we modestly attempt here -
through offering an approach that can loosely be described as the ‘Biography of
Artefacts Framework’.

The Biography of Artefacts Framework

It has become axiomatic in Science and Technology Studies (STS), the sub-discipline
in which we are located, that we need to analyse technologies not just as material
objects but also as ‘heterogeneous assemblages’, which means taking into account the
visions and beliefs, the techniques and practices, as well as the various actors
involved in the development, implementation, use and governance of an innovation.
The creation and implementation of new technologies thus involves a complex
interplay between diverse ‘social’ and ‘technical’ factors. As there is no clear
boundary between what is social and what is technical, we should refer to these more
precisely as socio-technical factors (though the latter term is something of a mouthful
and for ease of expression we have not always used it (Hughes [1983])).

One of the ongoing debates within STS is that there has been insufficient attention to
theorising how these socio-technical assemblages and their development are shaped
by their historical context. There are important exceptions of course. Bijker (1995),
for example, drew attention to the configuration of the Technological Frame(s) that
surrounds the development and use of an artefact. More particularly, scholars from the
Social Shaping of Technology (SST) perspective (MacKenzie and Wajcman 1985)
have sought to characterise how the pathways of technological innovation are
patterned by their history and context. That is, how innovation is shaped by an array
of existing social relationships: the knowledges and commitments of various actors
involved; the complementary technologies available, and in particular by the ways
these elements are all configured together (Sørensen and Williams 2002). One of the

13
new concepts that have arisen within SST to capture the dynamics of innovation
processes is that of the ‘biography of artefacts’.

Brady, Tierney and Williams (1992) suggested that packaged software artefacts had
biographies – highlighting how custom applications became the basis of commodified
niche-specific solutions. Williams (1997) further applied this concept to analysing the
evolution of Computer-Aided Production Management (CAPM) systems. The notion
was used to describe how new industrial IT applications often emerged through the
enhancement of existing applications. When supplier offerings were implemented,
they inevitably had to be adapted to fit the technical and operational circumstances of
adopting organisations. This process often threw up further useful innovations that
could feed into future technology supply. Industrial automation artefacts thus evolved
through successive cycles of technical development and industrial implementation
and use, a ‘spiral of innovation’ if you like, oscillating between moments of
development, implementation and use. These short-term cycles were phases in a
longer-term biography; and longitudinal studies showed how the CAPM and MRP II
systems of the 1980s and 1990s, widely seen as the precursors for today’s ERP
systems, themselves emerged from stock and production control systems developed in
the 1960s in Vehicle and Aerospace sectors. Later Pollock (Pollock et al. 2003;
Pollock & Cornford 2004) expanded the concept of biography to study how ERP
systems were able to move within and across industrial sectors (most notably from the
private to the public). And in so doing they highlighted how these systems often
carried with them large amounts of ‘accumulated functionality’ and how this ‘history’
had important implications of the reshaping of adopting organisations (public
organisations and specifically universities). Overall then our early usage of the
concept of biography drew our attention to the way in which the development and
evolution of artefacts was shaped by its social (or more precisely socio-technical)
context.

What we want to do now with our emerging biographies framework is to redirect the
analytical lens, if you like; to broaden the scope of enquiry away from the (mainly
implementation) stages about which we already have a reasonable body of knowledge
and towards those locales and moments of innovation where much less is known (of
which there are many of interest and relevance). We also suggest that to have a

14
complete understanding of the biography of the packaged enterprise solution we must
not simply study single systems but trace and compare the career of a number of
solutions. On top of this, we must also broader our field of view. We must shift our
lens outwards at times to investigate the wider context in which these systems are
located, to capture the other actors who play a role in constituting these systems and
the market in which they are located. Some of the suggestions we will put forward in
the book include the arguments of a move away from ‘flat ethnographies’ or simple
methodological nostrums such as ‘following the actor’ (Latour 1987) to more
theoretically informed, longitudinal selections of different sites and moments for
study. We will argue that there is the need for a different type of qualitative study, a
more ‘strategic ethnography’, which addresses the technology/society relationship at
multiple levels and timeframes. In lieu of what we might call ‘atomistic studies’ we
want to focus on the need for biographies that track the trajectory of a group of
artefacts and their associated practices over time; and for better spatial metaphors
addressing how these generic and global technologies are instantiated at multiple sites
and across distributed contexts (see Burawoy et al. [2000] who have discussed this
latter point albeit not in the context of software packages). Rather than study ERP, for
instance, in particular socially/temporally bounded locales we argue for a ‘variable
research geometry’ that can be applied to diverse issues and in differing contexts,
depending on the issue(s) being addressed and entities being tracked. More
concretely, we develop the concept of biographies as a means of analysing the
emergence and evolution of software packages. And here we found useful to follow
Hyysalo’s (2004) multi-level framework and distinguish at a least three different
levels:

(i) the development of particular enterprise systems (as well as the

organizations and people connected to them);

(ii) the development of an overall class of artefact; and

(iii) the coupling of a technological field and a societal practice.

15
To this aim we seek to provide tools for analysing the influence of the social setting at
different levels of generality (from the immediate micro-context of involved actors, to
the broader institutional macro-setting) as well as the multiple historical timescales
(short, medium and long-term) at which analysis may be undertaken. We identify the
social spaces in which innovation occurs, including the specific arenas in which
technologies are developed and implemented, and broader linkages across this
heterogeneous community. Here, we highlight the emergence of new kinds of
intermediaries, such as industry analysts, who help shape expectations about the
development of technological fields and constitute markets for constantly changing
supplier offerings.

RESEARCH SCOPE
This book is based on a long-term research project where we have been able to
assemble what we would argue is a comprehensive and in-depth picture of the
evolution of particular enterprise-wide solutions for the greater part of their lifecycle,
from their early stages of conception to today, including projections of future
developments. We have had unique access to several software providers, including a
global software giant whom we describe throughout using the pseudonym ‘SoftCo’,
and a number of user organisations and user fora. Importantly we have been able to
view the work of SoftCo from a number of distinctive viewpoints. Firstly, this was
from ‘inside’ where we observed how they managed their packages as well as the
users attached to them at one particular point in their lifecycle (the technical support
process for their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system). Secondly,
again from the inside, we witnessed how SoftCo interfaced with various sets of users
during the development of one of their products (this was the design and requirements
gathering stages of a new ERP module that we describe throughout as ‘Campus’).
Thirdly, we continued to study this particular ERP module along a number of
different phases in its life cycle, from inception through to ‘maturity’. Fourthly, we
also studied the module at the supplier-user nexus through long-term participation in a
particular SoftCo User Group where we observed the user community attached to the
module and wider ERP system. We can thus claim to have a comprehensive
knowledge of this particular ERP module (having followed its career for nearly a
decade now).

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As well as discussions of ERP, we also analysed other solutions - although our
knowledge of them is based on much shorter studies. We researched the design of a
small software package, which is being used for accommodation management,
relatively early in its development. We studied this system particularly from the point
of view of its history and future projections (i.e. regarding which markets the supplier
hoped to take it into) and this was useful as it allowed use compare the strategies of
various vendors and at different stages of maturity. We also conducted a study of a
CRM system procurement within a large public organisation. This gave us the
opportunity to observe how suppliers present their solutions to potential users and
how adopters make technical assessments of the various vendor offerings and
‘promises’. Finally we conducted a study of a group of industry analysts called ‘The
Gartner Group’ which, whilst not directly involved in the production or use of
software, play an important role in constituting various aspects of the wider packaged
enterprise system arena.

In terms of our emerging framework, the approach we have adopted is a comparative

one that analyses the biography of a number of packages as they move across similar
organisations, from one national context to another, and from the private to public
sector. The selected packages were at different stages in their biography and were
characterised by different levels of product maturity and standardisation. This rich
combination of data collection methods enabled detailed current and longitudinal
analysis and comparisons between cases in different sectors and stages in the package
maturation. Whilst we discuss our framework in more detail in Chapter Three, we
briefly mention our overarching methodology and research design. Most of the
insights presented here were gathered during ethnographic research and observation.
At times, however, we also supplemented this research with interviews. We chose our
sites based on a combination of opportunism and through theoretically informed
choices about which sites and nexuses might be interesting and, according to our view
of the state of the field, in need of further study. In other words, we studied those
places where we could negotiate access (and a difficulty with access is one reason for
the relative paucity of studies of packaged software design) but also sought out
particular sites. These choices, of course, were constantly being modified to address
new phenomena and particularly ‘surprises’. This was the case, for instance, when we
chose to study the supplier/user nexus and the complex web of relations that exist

17
between them, which, in turn, alerted us to the important role of industry analysts.
This group of experts has since become a major focus of our subsequent work.

The biography approach is a novel and ambitious one. There are two further aspects
worth mentioning that have meant we have been able to conduct such a study. First,
this is our historical perspective, facilitated by the fact we have been able to revisit
findings and material from research conducted over the last two decades ago now as
well as studies carried out more recently. In terms of the former, this was the 1987-
1991 study of CAPM conducted by Fleck, Webster and Williams. This was research
funded under the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Programme in
Information and Communication Technology (PICT) where we were amongst the first
social scientists to investigate the shaping of earlier types of packaged enterprise
solutions and their effects on organisations. In terms of the latter, Pollock and
Cornford conducted a 1998-2001 a further ESRC study of an ERP implementation
where they followed the system rollout over a three period in one particular
organisation. This has meant in our current study – our 2003-2007 ESRC research
grant on the Biography and Evolution of Standard Software Packages conducted by
Pollock and Williams - we have been able to contrast our research and assessment at
the time with the state of the field as it has panned out today. Importantly, this has
allowed us to highlight the interesting linkages that current day technologies share
with their older predecessors, and to analyse current developments in light of this
historical knowledge. One of the unusual things this historical insight has permitted us
to do, for instance, is to be able to criticise the now well-rehearsed historical account
of the emergence of ERP systems. As the conclusions of the 1990 Eindhoven Group
workshop demonstrate, the future direction of the technology was far from clear at the
time. We have thus been able to trace (some aspects of) the complicated rise of the
ERP system.

Second, in conducting our analysis, we have also drawn upon parallel research by our
Edinburgh colleague D’Adderio (2004), doctoral research by Grimm (2008) and
Wang (2007a), who through ethnographic research have looked at the birth and
evolution of major software packages through contemporary and retrospective study.
Grimm conducted a participant observation of one of the worlds leading software
producers (some of which we include in Chapter Eight). Wang traced the birth and

18
evolution of the Chinese national champion selling organisational Product Data
Management (PDM) technologies in the Construction sector. We might suggest that it
is only because we can draw upon this distinctive historical and interdisciplinary
knowledge base brought together in our wider research team that we can write this
book. This suggests that studying the biography of the enterprise solution is
increasingly a ‘team task’ and not something that can be done alone or though a single
study (cf. Burawoy et al. 2000; Koch 2007).

Two other final points merit attention. Firstly, is that we do not include in the book an
implementation study; nor do we look at the effects of enterprise-wide systems on
adopting organisations and users. We do not see this omission as a limitation. Instead,
it represents one of the choices we have made in the current study. Much has already
been much written about ERP implementation in the sociological and information
system literature; some of which is reviewed in Chapters One through to Three. We
have taken this study and this book as an opportunity to explore other aspects of the
career of the packaged enterprise systems, which we think are of equal importance but
have had nowhere near similar attention. Secondly, we have chosen to mask the
identity of the organisations we have studied, except in one case where we thought it
necessary to talk specifically about the work of one particular actor. This is ‘The
Gartner Group’ where we saw them to be of such significance, as well uniquely
identifiable, that it would have made little sense to attempt to anonymize them.

Structure of this book

We begin in Chapter One by introducing the recent history of the software package
industry. Here longstanding concerns about the availability, price and quality of
software surfaced in an episode which became known as the ‘software crisis’ and
which led to the reorganisation of software production and ultimately the rise of
packaged software. We also review the main phases of the software package lifecycle
- from design through to procurement, implementation, use and post-implementation.
Whilst this first chapter is primarily descriptive, the following two are conceptual in
nature. Chapter Two engages in detail with debates within STS about some of the
major frameworks through which technologies and innovation have been
conceptualised, including ideas about how to theorise the relationship between

19
technology and society. Chapter Three is where we set out the Biography of Artefacts
Framework. This is followed by the various empirical chapters.

There are five empirical chapters in all, which are organised around interrelated
themes. The first two, which closely build on each other, study the tension between
software as a solution to specific user problems and as a generic product. This is, to
use the framework we are developing, the biography of a particular innovation and of
a wider product. As we will show these are two different views on the same
technology, highlighting often-contrasting needs and demands from the different
actors involved. More specifically, Chapter Four describes the development of the
new ERP module we call ‘Campus’ built by one of the largest software package
suppliers in the world. We describe how many users agreed to act as pilot sites for the
new software predicated on the belief that they could influence the shaping of the
package (through allowing the software to be designed around their organisation).
Once the supplier attempted to make their product more generic, however, the user
organisations experienced a loss of control as their specific features were ‘designed
out’ of the system. Unsurprisingly, this provided something of a strain on the
relationships between the suppliers and user organisations (which is the theme of the
chapter).

Chapter Five continues to analyse how package suppliers’ manage the tension
between designing a module for a group of specific users and, at the same time, a set
of wider yet unknown users (the potential global market). Taking the view of the
software producer this time, we compare two software producers targeting a similar
sector. We investigate how both take decisions about product design and markets as
well as how these influence the uptake and eventual fit of the package. From a more
conceptual point of view the chapter attempts to describe a set of revealed strategies
by which suppliers produce software that embodies characteristics common across
many users; what we term ‘generification’ and ‘generification work’.

The next two chapters, which also closely build on each other, shift our focus away
from specific innovations and products and towards the wider ‘technological field’
that constitutes software packages. Through this term, we address how certain ideas

20
about software packages achieve currency and become resources for others (and also
how these ideas can change over time). In this sense, the broader technological field
can be thought to possess a biography as ideas about software packages and their
organisational benefits change (but evolve much more slowly than that of particular
artefacts within that field). What interests us in these two chapters is how the
technological field surrounding generic software comes to be constituted by certain
key players and are also sustained by the activities of the wider communities of
organisational users. Chapter Six considers the issue of ‘procurement’. Procurement is
interesting because it is the process by which a potential adopting organisation
becomes bound up with the biography of a particular artefact. This process moreover
turns out to involve high levels of ambiguity, as there is often a lack of reliable
information about the capacities and performance of packages and their ‘fit’ with the
particular requirements of the would-be adopter. Those procuring solutions are often
faced with intensive marketing efforts and may see more detailed and comparable
information by organising ‘beauty contests’ from different package suppliers. We
show how the procurement team within one large organisation laboriously attempt to
analyse and ‘compare’ various offerings so that an effective and ‘accountable’ choice
can be made.

What is interesting about procurement, as we explore more fully in the next chapter, is
that it takes place on a highly complex terrain, involving various actors (organisation
members, expert intermediaries and suppliers) who influence the practice of choosing
between packages, and thus help constitute the market of technology artefacts and the
field of technological practice. Chapter Seven vividly demonstrates how there are new
kinds of intermediaries emerging and the work thy do in shaping expectations about
the nature of software packages as well as constituting the markets for constantly
changing supplier offerings. In particular, we look at the work of ‘industry analysts’
and the construction of one of the most infamous of market analysis tools - the ‘Magic
Quadrant’. This device is widely circulated amongst the IT community so as to
compare and rank vendors according to a number of highly contested evaluative
criteria. These assessments include intangible properties such as supplier
‘competence’ and ‘vision’. Given that potential adopters are drawn to assess the
reputation of vendors and products during procurement, we find these tools play an
important role in mediating choices. Their assessments appear to play a role in

21
allowing user organisations to make comparisons between the proliferations of
offerings. In other words, what was once a highly uncertain terrain is now becoming
more organised (and we highlight the role of industry analysts in drawing and
redrawing boundaries around the technological field).

Chapter Eight is the final empirical discussion and takes us inside the offices of
‘SoftCo’. Here we view the software through the lens of a supplier attempting to
manage its wide family of generic products through one particular moment in the
software package lifecycle - the support function (the process by which the supplier
resolves the technical problems its users experience when installing solutions). The
supplier is faced with the difficult problem of supporting the systems of its massively
large and highly distributed user base. It has recently moved from what might be
described as a ‘territorial’ model of support to one that is a predominately online
(what we describe as a ‘globalised face-to-portal’ form of support). We describe the
novel organisational form that has been put in place, which includes a global network
of labs and sophisticated ICTs, and show the complex workings of this network as
well as the various strategies developed by the supplier to lift out technical problems
from out of their local context and bring them back to its labs.

Chapter Nine attempts to both bring together the main concepts developed in the book
as well as build towards a more general discussion of how we might develop our
conception of software packages. The reader should be aware that each of the
arguments developed in the empirical chapters gradually build upon each other. They
reflect the (roughly chronological) development of both our empirical and conceptual
analysis. Each chapter develops diverse themes most of which (but not all) contribute
to the overall discussion of the biography of the enterprise system. In this sense, the
book is best read from beginning to end. The empirical chapters are to some extent
self-contained in that each discusses its own theoretical starting point, empirical
setting and detailed methodology and presents conclusions. In this respect, the reader
should be aware that the final conclusions presented in Chapter Nine do not attempt to
recapitulate all the arguments developed in the empirical chapters. The various
chapters, particularly the empirical ones, reflect our own intellectual journey and
process of discovery. The careful reader will notice how our analytical lens develops

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– changing its focus and (hopefully) growing in sophistication and acuity, as we
progress and trace out the biography of the enterprise system.

1 To some extent, this has already happened. As we will show many of the more influential accounts of enterprise-wide systems
now stem from American Business Schools.
2 This broad area of work might in some places also come under alternative designations like ‘Social Informatics’ (see for
instance Kling [2007]).
3 We might call the seemingly impossible project of developing the generic solution as akin to the ‘flying bumblebee problem’.
According to calculations and presumptions from theoretical physics, bumblebees should not be able to fly (this is despite the
frequent observation of flying bumblebees).
4 SAP is the biggest ERP supplier, followed by Oracle (which in 2003 took over Peoplesoft which in turn had just acquired JD
Edwards – the next two largest players in the ERP market). Between them, they account for over 60% of the market, though there
are a number of other challengers (Brunellii 2006).

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