“computerization” program that the State Government asked Public Sector Organizations to implement (State Government Order, January 10, 2005).
Accordingly, many PSOs in this State had ongoing “ERP implementation” programs (Malayala Manorama daily, March 13, 2006). GovIndia was no exception. The government order did not mention or suggest “ERP implementation” per se. Instead, the order asked the PSOs to ‘modernize’ the organization by ‘implementing modern Information Technology tools’ that would help ‘faster effective decision-making and management’ (State Government Order, 2004). As the top management reported, GovIndia (like other PSOs) had a free hand to choose what to implement and how to implement it. The top management held a series of discussions in which the TU’s were
not involved. It also discussed this point in the regular monthly meetings with the head of each department. Through such discussions the idea of implementing an “integrated software solution” (Company document, 2006) came up. In the spirit of
“computerization” that was synonymously used for automation of work practices, GovIndian managers expected such an integrated software solution to be capable of exhaustively automating the work processes (Minutes of HOD meeting, January 6, 2006). For example, below is a representative excerpt from interviews with the employees:
Head of department 1: In the beginning our expectation was to get a very high level of automation of manual work. I don’t mean exactly a paperless office but pretty much close to that, and then a good information flow across all departments to get all
relevant information online..the idea was to achieve exhaustive automation that would lead to reduction of our work. Therefore, everyone was interested in this project.
Senior Accounts Officer: In the beginning, when we went for the first meeting with Itech (the ERP consultant who implemented the ERP) our idea about ERP was that everything we will get at our fingertips..our goal was to have a paperless office. This is what we heard.. this is what we expected. We had a nice picture of our work getting reduced.
Fifteen interviews reflected ‘paperless office’ (in vivo) or exhaustive automation as an expectation of ERP implementation referring to this period of time. Related
expressions (e.g., complete automation) came up in twenty other interviews. As indicated in the above two excerpts, the expectation of the staff was that such automation would lead to reduction of their work content. This seems to be the primary reason for employees’ initial interests. Next, I describe how this image of exhaustive automation was subsumed into another image, an integrated software.
GovIndia is divided broadly into two domains: a) office side, and b) plant side. The
office buildings are geographically located near the main entrance of the company (1/4 mile from the entrance and within one-mile radius), while the plant buildings are located farther from the main entrance (1.5 mile from the entrance and within six-mile radius). The plant side has its own separate entrance. The main functions of the office side are those that support the production such as general management, finance and accounting, sales, HR, administration, materials management, project management, and purchase. The main functions of the plant side are direct production such as manufacturing of the basic chemicals and maintenance of the plants and the office including the buildings and equipment. The office side had an existing independent Information Systems (IS) while the plant side had no IS. The initial idea was to integrate the existing independent MIS of the office side into a large integrated
software. But since these MISs had been developed with old genre software languages for which expertise was not available in the market, the management dropped the idea of integrating existing IS. The next idea was to purchase an off-the-shelf software that could integrate and automate all office functions. Later, the functions of the plant side also were added into the project. Thus, the final idea was to go for an “integrated software solution” that could integrate all functions of GovIndia (Minutes of Board room meeting, 12, February, 2006). The minutes of the meeting did not mention the idea of automation. However, during the interviews most of the interviewees recalled that they had interpreted integrated software as a part of computerization (that is automation), and therefore expected it to result in automation of employees’ manual tasks.
After the idea of an integrated software solution was finalized in the HODs meetings, the Managing Director (MD) constituted a “cell” (task force) to prepare with the details of tender advertisement and a draft of the work contract. The cell had eleven
members at the middle manager/officer level, each one representing different department. The cell members had expected that they would be given the overall responsibility to implement the software. By the time the final drafts of the tender advertisement and the work contract were ready, the chairman of the cell passed away.
Subsequently, the MD dissolved the cell. The MD transferred the responsibilities of the software implementation to the Head of the Project division (HPD). HPD requested the MD to transfer the then-materials manager to assist HPD in the
implementation. The MD created a new post, Manager Information System (MIS) and transferred the materials manager to Projects Division appointing him as M. Here onwards HPD and MIS had been the coordinators for the software implementation. I use the term ‘ERP coordinators’ to denote MIS and HPD, as GovIndian employees used it. Before MIS’s post was created, GovIndia had invited competitive bids for the software implementation.
5.4 Stage 1: From integrated software to customizable integrated software-ERP an