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Introduction
The importance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the world economy is now uncontested (OCDE, 2002). In fact, most large enterprises depend on SMEs for their supply chain (Julien, 1998). Globalization, the internationalization of markets, the knowledge-based economy and the rise of e-business represent challenges that must be met by SMEs as well as large firms (Kalantaridis, 2004). In order to survive, grow and increase their competitiveness in the new business environment, most of these organizations have deployed information technologies (IT) and information systems (IS) (Premkumar, 2003), and many have implemented ERP in particular (Muscatello et al. , 2003).
Given the lowering of certain IT costs, a targeting of the SME segment by ERP vendors whose large enterprise market is mostly saturated (Morabito et al. , 2005) and the availability of new system alternatives that are better adapted to their specific context, more and more SMEs are adopting ERP systems (Bajwa et al. , 2004; Snider et al. , 2009). As SMEs generally lack resources and competencies with regard to information systems, the great diversity of system suppliers and the availability of numerous alternatives render their adoption of an ERP system an even more complex exercise (Bingi et al. , 1999). Moreover, whereas most studies of the ERP adoption phenomenon has been made in the context of big business, few attempts have been made to study small business in this regard (van Everdingen et al. , 2000; Aloini et al. , 2007). However, given the specificities of SMEs as organizations, research results obtained from the study of large enterprise IT/IS cannot necessarily be generalized and transfered to SMEs (Thong, 1999).
Notwithstanding the substantial benefits that can ensue from a successful ERP implementation, certain authors emphasize that this exercise is very risky (Davenport, 1998; Bernard et al. , 2004). And while IT implementation projects are reputed to be risky in general, the combination of a technology implementation with a reconfiguration of business processes as well as the scope of their functional coverage make ERP implementation projects even more risky (Austin and Nolan, 1999; Hunton et al. , 2004). Also, a SME would have greater difficulty than a large firm in surmounting an ERP implementation failure. As ERP projects are growing in importance and...