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1. Introduction
Enterprise software applications are large, configurable and generic software that cover different processes of an organization and helps them achieve cost savings while helping to adhere to industry best practices (Howcroft and Light, 2006). Examples of such enterprise application software are enterprise resource planning (ERP) and software that support enterprise-wide processes such as supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM) and human resources management. Software as a service (SaaS) applications are cloud-based applications that are accessed over the internet and are managed by the vendors who charge a “pay-as-you-go” subscription fee (Bhardwaj et al., 2010), whereas “on-premise” applications require the organization to install a version of the software locally, by obtaining a software license (Howcroft and Light, 2006; D’Souza et al., 2012; Bhattacherjee and Park, 2014). Organizations that are looking to acquire information technology (IT) products and services are increasingly adopting a “cloud-first” strategy when it comes to buying new software or replace existing IT assets (Gartner, 2019).
As SaaS (and cloud computing) is a relatively new area, the extant research has focused on the reasons why SaaS is adopted by organizations (Abd Elmonem et al., 2016) rather than how they go about identifying and adopting a specific SaaS application. Other areas of research in SaaS have focused on issues such as security concerns with SaaS (Benlian and Hess, 2011; Sommer et al., 2012), diffusion of SaaS (Martins et al., 2016), customization challenges (Mijač et al., 2013) and so on. Research that focused on how SaaS selections have suggested quantitative models to identify a specific SaaS application from a long list using tools such as analytical hierarchy process (AHP) (Godse and Mulik, 2009; Mital et al., 2014), balanced scorecard (Lee et al., 2013) and potential adoption index (Ercolani, 2013). During this review of the extant literature, we did not identify any study that examined the process followed by organizations to organizations identify and select a specific SaaS application.
The extant studies on on-premise enterprise software selection have used the lens of organizational buying behavior, as they are often a multiphase, multi-person, multi-departmental and multi-objective process and is normally a very long complex process (Verville and Halingten, 2003a; Bhatti, 2014), which is a key aspect...