Organizational Learning, Absorptive Capacity, and Performance for ERP

This dissertation focuses on the acquisition of information systems technology. The central purpose of this dissertation is to address the organizational processes that contribute to the successful implementation of IS, and explain why some organizations achieve financial returns and strategic advantages from their IS efforts while others do not. The population consists of top level IS executives in the US or Canada employed in firms who have implemented enterprise resource planning software. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) has the capability to join disparate data sources and make them available across enterprises in a personalized, secure, and drillable fashion. The relationships between absorptive capacity, organizational learning and performance represent the research framework for the dissertation. A path begins from absorptive capacity to organizational learning, but because organizational learning is divided into three stages there are three separate paths leading to each level in organizational learning: assimilation, integration and optimization.