Data warehousing (DW) in the last decade has become the technology of choice for building data management infrastructures to provide organizations the decision-making capabilities needed to effectively carry out its activities. Despite its phenomenal growth and importance to organizations the rate of DW implementation success has been less than stellar. Many DW implementation projects fail due to technical or organizational reasons. There has been limited research on organizational factors and their role in DW implementations. It is important to understand the role and impact of both technical but organizational factors in DW implementations and their relative importance to implementation performance. A research model was developed to test the significance of technical and organizational factors in the three phases of implementation with DW implementation performance. The independent variables were technical (data, technology, and expertise) and organizational (management, goals, users, organization). The dependent variable was performance (content, accuracy, format, ease of use, and timeliness). The data collection method was a Web based survey of DW implementers and DW users sampled (26) from a population of 108 identified DW implementations. Regression was used as the multivariate statistical technique to analyze the data. The results show that organization factors are significantly related to performance. Also, that some variables in the post-implementation phase have a significant relationship with performance. Based on the results of the tests the model was revised to reflect the relative impact of technical and organizational factors on DW performance. Results suggest that in some cases organizational factors have a significant relationship with DW implementation performance. The implications and interpretation of these results provide researchers and practitioners' insights and a new perspective in the area of DW implementations.

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ABSTRACT The increasingly competitive nature of the manufacturing industry has forced manufacturers to examine alternatives to traditional management philosophies. Although lean's success had been proven it was not uncommon for companies that opt to implement lean concepts to meet with mixed results and sometimes even outright failure. The purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between organizational characteristics and issues associated with lean implementation. The study identified the following organizational characteristics (a) organizational leadership, (b) organizational culture, and (c) organizational change and examined the role each played in lean implementation efforts. The study also looked at sixteen individual (d) intrinsic organizational characteristics to determine the extent to which each impacted lean implementation efforts. The study utilized both qualitative and quantitative research tools. The qualitative component utilized both document analysis and interviews. The interviews were conducted with area business leaders who were members of the Department of Technology's Industrial Advisory Committee at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. The quantitative component utilized a separate on-line survey that was developed and administered to members of the Illinois Manufacturers' Association. Results indicated highly capable leadership was the number one indicator of success for organizations that made the transition to lean. Other key factors included communication channels with an effective feedback system, the development of collaborative relationships between management and employees, being well versed in the practice of change management, and understanding how to effect change of cultural mores within an organization. The implications of understanding how the organizational characteristics discussed in the study affected lean implementation empowered organizations to effect change more successfully. The goal of implementing lean successfully required much more than a step by step process of implementing the lean tools in a particular order. It required a broad understanding of the things which cannot be seen; things such as, what constitutes highly capable leadership, knowing how to change the mores of organizational culture, and understanding how to overcome the barriers to successful change management. Understanding these complex relationships provided the basis upon which to advance lean implementation theory where it had been only marginally successful.

Having a modern Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is seen as increasingly important if an organisation wants to compete in today’s business environment. The implementation of a new ERP system can result in added automatization and the replacement and/or coupling of legacy systems. The replacement and coupling of legacy systems can help an organisation increase data integrity and accessibility by lowering data fragmentation. Previous research on the topic of ERP implementations has emphasized user participation as an important factor when aiming to succeed with an implementation. The research is however inconsistent with its use of participation and involvement where involvement is often used synonymously with participation, but sometimes it signifies that the implementation is of personal importance to the user. This study defines user participation as the user partaking in activities relating to the implementation, and user involvement is defined as the user perceiving the project or system as important. This study also introduces a new term: user inclusion, which encompasses both user participation, and if a user is on the receiving end of one-way communication, for example when receiving a newsletter. This study argues that symbolic adoption, the belief that implementing the system is a good idea, is an important part of system success and uses a combination of factors from the UTAUT model and the I/S success model as antecedents to the dimensions of symbolic adoption that has been presented in previous research. The purpose of this study is to examine how users are included in ERP implementation processes, and how their inclusion in the process affects users’ symbolic adoption. To address this purpose, a qualitative multi-case study that included two cases was conducted. In order to answer how users are included, this study divides how into three sub-questions; who; when and in what way users were included throughout the implementation. ​This study concludes that users’ inclusion increases over time throughout the implementation process, both in terms of influence, and in number of participating users. This study also shows that users included in project initiatives can affect the antecedents to symbolic adoption in various ways, both their own symbolic adoption, and that of their non-participating colleagues. An example of this is how intended users’ expectations can be managed through communication and when they get first-hand experience of the system, their expectations correct themselves so that they are closer to the actual performance and effort required. The antecedents, performance and effort expectancy, are in turn linked to the symbolic adoption dimension effort worthiness.