Exploring the Business Case Development Process in Inter-Organizational Enterprise System Implementations

Creating and negotiating an inter-organizational business case (BC) for multiple-stakeholder enterprise systems is a major challenge. This paper looks closer into the factors that influence the stakeholders’ willingness to share information necessary for the BC development. The authors develop an explanatory framework showing the effect that project constellation has on the development of a shared BC. They identify several factors, such as goal consensus, cultural and semantic similarities and willingness to share information, that mitigate this effect. Subsequently, the authors apply the framework in an inter-organizational case study in which a BC is developed. The findings show that current BC development methods need to be re-stated and complemented by new tools and interventions to support stakeholders in the inter-organizational specific setting. The authors elaborate on the possibilities that group decision support systems might offer to overcome challenges that might be experienced in the BC development process.