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Introduction
Information systems (IS), since their introduction into organizations over five decades ago, have promised to streamline business processes, integrate disparate systems, increase innovation, and offer greater competitive advantage. Over the past decades, the evolution of IS has mirrored many of the challenges experienced by our work organizations. For example, throughout the 1980s a primary concern for many organizations was the attainment of competitive advantage within their respective industries (Porter, 1980). The IS field responded by developing systems that sought to provide management with timely information to assist in making better strategic decisions, for example, executive support and decision support systems. In the 1990s, organizations began to look inwards searching for key strategic resources that would yield unique core competencies (Barney, 1991). Similarly, the IS field responded by building highly integrative enterprise-wide systems (Davenport, 1998), which would unite every pillar of the organization with a single transparent view of firm competencies and business processes, viz Enterprise Systems. The first decade of the 21st century continued in this vein, with organizations extending their global reach through new and innovative business models (Johnson et al. , 2008). Similarly, IS have responded with the emergence of digital technologies and their continued growth as transformative organizational systems enabling boundary-less corporate structures, 24/7 real-time customer-centric communication, collaborative supply chain environments, and virtual IS infrastructures delivered via cloud computing.
Yet, this parallel journey between organizations and IS has not always run smoothly. History has taught us that large-scale IS implementations have caused significant challenges for organizations (Iveroth, 2010). While they promise greater organizational efficiencies and strategic effectiveness, research shows that such gifts are not easily obtained (Markus and Benjamin, 1997). Large-scale IS initiatives often require transformational change by seeking realignment of business processes, which frequently requires significant cultural change across the entire organization.
A preliminary review of the Enterprise Systems (ES) literature reveals that organizational change has been central to scholarly debate since these systems emerged in the early 1990s. In preparation for this special issue, we, the Guest Editors, scanned the titles of 768 articles from across 113 Harzing ranked Journals and found that more than twice as many ES studies have focused on 'organisational-level' aspects rather than 'technical-level' issues: for example, topics such as leading large-scale change (Wei et...