Reconfiguration environment to evaluate their financial position. This put

4.3. Reconfiguration environment to evaluate their financial position. This put

support staff under a great amount of pressure since the

To reinvent the way faculty ‘do accounting’, the project ERP was failing to capture and record accurately changes in

team had thus purposely designed the ERP financial man- research activities. Not long after going live with the ERP,

agement module without incorporating the possibility for tensions between faculty and their support staff became

commitment accounting calculations. Faculty were invited evident:

to participate in project information sessions but few did, “One of my [staff] is quitting. She came out of a meeting

sobbing after talking with

believing that because the system was being designed for

a new hot-shot faculty mem-

them it would, by definition, accommodate their needs. The ber from the United Nations who said ‘I will get the

it to me stage the choice to exclude commitment

lack of faculty involvement meant that during the config- information I need one way or another, you give

uration/design

or I will get consultants in here to get it for me. [This

ERP project] is an excuse that you have been using for reconfiguration of the sociomaterial

accounting was not contentious. However, once the ERP

was rolled-out, the

far too long’. She said to me ‘I can’t deal – I shouldn’t have

to deal – I don’t want to take work home like I have been’.

assemblage to exclude commitment accounting immedi-

and resistance. It was at

ately became a source of tension

These high level project guys know that the staff are

this point that an information asymmetry became appar-

having a hard

time and yet they are not communicat-

ent between the PIs and the ERP – between people and ing to [Ivy] leadership to get better solutions. Last week

machines – where the nest of relationships had been re- a bunch of [FSS] approached [the Director of Financial

configured in a manner that limited the scope of interaction Planning] and

said

‘Tell the faculty that we don’t have

with the grant accounting figures and the capacities for

the tools we need to do our jobs. We know we are not

human action ( Suchman, 2007 ) – in this case forcing faculty

equipped,

and

you know too – why are you not telling

to allocate/spend money in a manner preferred by central

the faculty?”’ [Academic manager, spring 2000]

accounting leadership. The ERP had not been programmed

to emulate the same reports as the legacy assets and it As Law and Singleton note (2005) , it is as much the

was not sufficiently interactional that it could access the absent relationships that determine the nature of prac-

PIs situation to provide useful information. tice. The inability of faculty to engage with commitment

PIs and other academic staff who were the main users accounting functionality meant that the capacity for action

of the system were puzzled when they began to use it, was designed to be dramatically different in the ERP envi-

not understanding why their valued commitment account- ronment. From a relational ontology we would expect

ing logics were absent when the project team had not resistance because we understand the logics of time- been constrained by a standardized information architec- phased budgeting that were inscribed within ERP are still

E.L. Wagner et al. / Management Accounting Research 22 (2011) 181– 197

sensitive to local circumstances and cannot be fully spec- was pretty telling. So now faculty aren’t using the ERP

ified ( Suchman, 2009 ). Academic constituencies began to and what we have as a result is a very expensive data

express disagreement with the proposed grant manage- repository and still a lot of silos of micro-computing.”

ment practice: [A project manager, summer 1999]

“We don’t know of even one research school that is Ivy had configured the practice of grant account- using this methodology. We’ve done some research as ing for the integrated ERP environment in such a way

an institution and no university we know of is using that the relationship between the people and things had

the [time-phased] method as implemented in the [Ivy] caused information and knowledge to be lost ( Suchman, ERP.” [Academic manager, spring 2000] 2009 ). Principal Investigators and their administrators Their displeasure

became evident to the project team were unable to constitute the relevant objects in the world around them because the practice community of adminis- who began to sense a gulf between central administrative perceptions and those of faculty and their staff: trators had evolved the technology in a way that enhanced the sociomaterial relationship for central accountants but

“We’re going to get a faculty revolt ‘cause [Ivy leaders] detracted from the relationship between faculty and their

are going to talk about how great the implementation grant accounts. Very powerful constituencies at Ivy were

was from a corporate level and they’re going to talk about contacting the Provost including one of the professional

how great the new tools are from a corporate level and schools that brought in the majority of all Ivy’s grant dollars.

faculty are going to just be incensed.” [Academic leader, This is illustrated in the following quote from the Director

spring 2000] of Finance at said professional school:

The above sentiment foreshadows events to come,

“We struggled for quite a while [with the ERP] but even-

which are highlighted in the next two quotes: tually – in listening to our end users say ‘we have to

“ . . . you look at the faculty and they say ‘well, what do have commitments’ and the [project team] saying – ‘oh, they’re just used

you to the old system eventually they’ll get

mean [the ERP’s] a success? I don’t have my reports.

over it’, it I have no idea how much my grant account or my grant became clear – not only to them – but to us,

balances are’. So there is an enormous disconnect . . . ”

that no, that isn’t the case, there’s always going to be a

[Project member, spring 2000] need for being able

to do commitments. So what we did,

we took that message over to the [project team], and I

In the summer of 2000 an academic leader states: said ‘look guys, departments really need commitments.

We have looked at “[Ivy] really missed an opportunity to understand the every creative way of using the ERP in either budgeting, reporting, whatever, and it’s become business that ran teaching and research and patient

care . . . they focused way too much on giving [Central] clear to us that we need a commitment [accounting] sys-

tem’. And I said ‘we’re poised at [our professional school]

they needed and not worrying about giving faculty

the information

the information they needed to manage to create our own commitment system but

what I would

like is to present this as a University issue and I want to

the business. So we just focused on the wrong things first.”

know whether or not you would like to join us in this

Rather than acquiesce to the ERP’s design, faculty and effort’?” [spring 2000]

These acts of resistance and confusion triggered the Provost to organize a series of lunch meetings with fac- phased budgeting approach, specifically:

their staff began to express concern about the ERP-enabled

internal control environment in general, and the time-

ulty members, their staff, and ERP-project team leaders.

“We tried to say, ‘I don’t really understand why you

These discussions convinced the Provost that commitment

made the decision to go with time-phasing but let’s try accounting was a non-negotiable practice for Ivy and was

to work with it’ and we tried to, but the reality is we still important for managing its institutional risk. She then don’t have basic business functionality that our faculty demanded that changes be made to the ERP software to

require.” [Academic manager, winter 1999] reinstate commitment accounting functionality. It was at

Seeing difficulties the their staff were having in trying to this point that the rhetoric of the project team changed: work with the ERP and worried that the new academic year “We became appeasement oriented and so when people

would bring with it complications because of this, several began hurting us, we said ‘yes’. And so we started build-

PIs and academic staff approached central administration ing these things that could create commitments and

– the sponsors of the ERP project – with their concerns: manage commitments . . . even though it was against our

professor [who was] the original ideas about what was the way forward Provost for and

“The Economics

[Ivy]”. [A project manager, summer used to be the VP for Finance and Administration [for 2000] Ivy] . . . called the [current] Provost really angry because In an attempt to move the project forward and get the

he couldn’t read his grant report. The [Financial Con- faculty to work with the ERP, the team agreed that three

troller] sat down with him and every concept he was courses of action were necessary. First, they would emulate

asking for was on that report. But he couldn’t see it and commitment accounting practices in the ERP environment

his [FSS] couldn’t explain it, so she’s been making him by developing software that could ‘bolt-on’ to the exist-

Excel reports. This guy’s smart – he knows what he’s ing accounting practices. Second, for the sixty days that it

doing and he can’t even read the report and I thought that would take them to customize the software they would

E.L. Wagner et al. / Management Accounting Research 22 (2011) 181– 197 191

allow PIs to use the legacy commitment accounting System. action Support Center (TSC). The three BSC staff were Third, they would make organizational changes to support required to evaluate the validity of departmental trans- the transition to an ERP-enabled environment. actions, eliminate the need to make post-hoc accounting

corrections and were expected to act as a control mech-