Towards a Supply-Chain Instrument to Monitor an Information Technology Implementation

Abstract

Based on improved information performance, agro-food companies and supply chains want to enhance their production processes. It creates the necessity to implement additional information technologies. The implementation of information technologies is, however, a complex task because of the interaction between technology, organization, and processes. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to present the development of a prototype of an “Implementation-monitoring Instrument” for project managers to help monitoring and managing an information-technology implementation towards required information performance. A design approach has been used to build the Instrument. The Instrument development is based on a literature review of a variety of theories explaining the mutual interaction between organization and technology. Keeping in mind the goal of the Instrument, the “information-quality literature” and “cost-benefit literature” is consulted as well. We aim to deliver a useful management Instrument, which is a step plan that helps chain actors to find the bottleneck of an information-performance failure. The Instrument allows for in-depth analysis of organizational and technical elements within processes that could be responsible for the information-performance failure. It is expected, in first instance, to be useful for the Dutch organic pork supply chain and other meat supply chains implementing new information technologies. In the future, the usage of this instrument will be prospectively tested and evaluated in a Dutch organic pork meat supply chain and retrospectively in two other agro-food supply chains.