A Process Model of Application Software Package Acquisition and Implementation

Abstract

The main purposes of this research are to suggest a model of the application software package (ASP) acquisition and implementation process and show that the perceived quality of an acquired ASP will be increased if substantial managerial efforts are devoted to the process. An ASP acquisition and implementation procedure decomposed into three subphases and consisting of 25 activities was proposed. To investigate the effectiveness of such a procedure, hypotheses were established and statistically tested. The moderating effects of the level of structuredness of the task to be computerized was also investigated. Results show that the amount of effort devoted to the ASP acquisition and implementation process has a positive and significant correlation with the perceived quality of an acquired ASP, and such a relationship is stronger when the level of structuredness of the task to be automated is low.