Prof. Jannis Kallinikos, The Athens University of Economics and Business: Acts and codes: some thoughts on ERP systems

The relatively recent emergence and diffusion of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems mark the development of a new series of computer-based tools for the management of organizations. ERP systems represent an effort to bring together the bits and pieces of various software applications and create a unified, organizational-wide software platform for conducting a large array of organizational activities. In this respect, the emergence and diffusion of ERP systems could be said to represent a natural and step-wise development of software technology that bear witness to the project of obtaining a better coordination of the many and diverse contributions that traverse the landscape of contemporary organizations.

However, at a closer scrutiny, the emergence of such organizational-wide systems attests to a rather different project aiming at constructing a minutely regulated world that can be employed as the generative matrix for forming and constituting most organizational roles and procedures. The distinctive character of ERP systems lies first in their attempt to bypass the fragmentation and limited domain of regulation of existing applications and secondly in their extensive agentic constitution (invitations to act in a specific and usually predetermined way).

Fragmentation is overcome through an open, modular architecture that achieves the interconnection of most organizational transactions and the automatic recording and tracking on the impact of each transaction (e.g. sales) on all possible others (e.g. warehousing, production, accounting, finance, human resources). Agentic functions are built by the specification of what constitutes the tasks and processes of an organization and the packaging of procedures and steps that have to be followed in order to accomplish a certain task (e.g. buying, selling, producing, moving, recording an item). The ideal is to obtain an organizational-wide inspection and visibility of the many activities and transactions that define the complex texture of organizational life and shape as far as possible the steps that make up the various contributions of organizational participants (Kallinikos 1998). This sort of comprehensive planning, execution and monitoring of organizational tasks can be said to differentiate ERP systems from the wider category of information systems.

In order to build software packages of this sort, it is necessary to define in advance all possible sequences of steps (processes) underlying the tasks and functions of organizations (SAP/R3 system identifies around 1000 processes that cover most activities of an assumed organization). The construction and commercial utilization therefore of ERP systems must imply the design of system of items and relations, which could be brought to bear on any organization. It is obvious that the design of such a system cannot but represent a decontextualized (i.e. deprived from particular characteristics) accomplishment that can, in the best case, be adjusted a posteriori to fit the circumstances of the particular organization, the tasks of which the package is called upon to monitor.

It is in this sense that the development and organizational embeddedness of ERP systems inaugurate a new circle of interventions on the fundamental tension that defines organized worlds, namely the contrast between the open and partly unpredictable character of context-embedded action and the decontextualized demands that the extension of spatio-temporal coordinates of human action beyond a 'here and now' renders necessary (Kallinikos 1996).

References: Kallinikos, J., 1996, Technology and Society: Interdisciplinary Studies in Formal Organization. Munich: Accedo.

Kallinikos, J., 1998, Organized Complexity: Posthumanist Remarks on the Technologizing of Intelligence, Organization, 5/3: 371-396.

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John Cumberbatch