Motivating Forces

From the study, multiple motivating influences were found to influence the decision to upgrade both SAP 4.6C upgrade and Windows 2000. Motivating forces are defined as any event, policy, or requirement that stimulates the interest to adopt a newer version of packaged software. In this study, motivating forces originated from both internal requirements and the organization’s dependency on the software vendor.

7.2.1 Internal Requirements

Three internal requirements were identified in the study to have created influences on the decision to upgrade. Two of these requirements, manager’s philosophy and company policy, guide the upgrade timeline. The third, business need, is a dynamic requirement that changes over time. The following sections focus on each of these elements.

7.2.1.1Manager’s Philosophy

At CP, the decentralized structure put the decision power on the head of each department. According to Blankenship and Miles (1968), this is a common phenomenon in large companies where upper level managers “claim greater freedom from their superior” in decision making. Manager’s philosophy provides a guideline on how aggressively they want to keep up with new software releases. SAPSD wanted to upgrade every 18 months, and the Infrastructure Group

wanted to keep up but not be overly aggressive. Overall, both groups adopted a moderate stance on new technology deployment, reflecting the organizational climate of a non-technology company (Swanson and Beath 1989). This comes as no surprise since IT departments are units within the corporation; the department’s maintenance policy is usually affected by the

company’s climate for innovation. In both cases, the policy serves as guidance to manage technology changes and can be bent to make concessions when there are competing projects.

7.2.1.2Company Policy

At CP, with millions of dollars at stake each day, the company had a strict policy that required all packaged software to stay on vendor support at all times. Although the policy remained dormant when software was not close to the end of the vendor’s sunset date, it became a powerful influence when software approached the sunset date without being upgraded.

Another company policy was “no beta version,” which both SAPSD and ISD observed. The policy governed when packaged software could be adopted, helping to prevent the adoption of unstable software packages. The strategy reduced the odds of having technical problems and consequently lessened the adverse impacts of upgrade.

7.2.1.3Business Needs

With IT serving business users, it is understandable that demand from the business community can be an important motivator. Almost all internal requirements are stamped from business needs to ensure a smooth and continuous business operations. Even though not all business needs trigger an upgrade, an imminent one can. In this study, business needs prompted

SAPSD to look into the new version of SAP and they found some potentially useful functionality that became one of the motivations for the SAP 4.6C upgrade. Likewise, the need to integrate business systems after CP’s acquisition of NAC in 2000 prompted the division-wide upgrade to Windows 2000.

7.2.2 External Dependency on Software Vendor

When organizations adopt packaged software, they become dependent on the software vendor to provide them with software functionality and technical support. In the old days, when system maintenance was mainly studied on in-house developed systems, three groups were involved in system maintenance: application systems, IS staff, and users (Swanson and Beath 1989). However, with packaged software, the number of groups expands to include the vendor that the organization relies upon for IT needs.

An organization’s dependency on software vendors for some of its most important IT resources gives vendors influence over an organization’s upgrade decision. According to Pfeffer and Salancik (1978), “It is the fact of the organization's dependence on the environment that makes the external constraint and control of organizational behavior both possible and almost inevitable” (p. 43). The extent to which the organization complies with external demands depends on three elements: (1) whether the resource is important, (2) whether the external company has “discretion over the resource allocation and use,” and (3) whether there are other alternatives for the resource (Pfeffer and Salancik 1978).

Both the Windows operating system and SAP system were extremely important to CP. One was the backbone for the entire business operation; the other was the platform that ran most of the business applications. Because both software packages were critical to CP’s continued

operation and survival, the threat of losing support and not receiving technical assistance was inconceivable to CP. As a result, the vendor’s sunset date was one of the most important motivating influences in an upgrade decision. Along with company policy that required all packaged software to remain on technical support, the sunset date become the ultimate deadline for IT to upgrade, as shown in the SAP 4.6C case.

7.2.2.1Functionality of Software

One important element that organizations look for in deciding whether to upgrade is the functionality in new version that can benefit them. In fact, the relative advantage of new

technology has long been recognized as an influence on individual adoption in the innovation diffusion literature (Rogers 1983).

In both cases, functionality was a strong motivating influence but not the trigger for the decision to upgrade to SAP 4.6C or Windows 2000. The SAPSD saw new functionality that they could adopt to meet business needs, and the Infrastructure Group recognized tremendous benefits in adopting Active Directory. Although a significant influence, functionality did not “evoke” (Mintzberg, Raisinghani and Theoret 1976) the upgrade in either case. In both cases, a working system already existed. As long as the current version was functional and there was no

immediate urgency to perform the upgrade, under the situation of scarce resources, CP’s IT usually waited to upgrade even though the new functionality was cited as having many benefits. Since both of the cases studied involved scarce resources, it is unclear if the outcome would have been different if resources were abundant. The next section will look at internal resources.