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Paper long abstract:

This research is based on the analysis of structured interviews and ethnographically observed practices and strategies of the developer of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, especially aimed at small scale and micro businesses.

The original research focus was to gain a better understanding of the socio-cultural issues and mechanisms of user participation driven design, regarding small scale business software development. As the fieldwork progressed, it became visible that the software developer of this case study used different user driven design concepts as part of his overall strategy to translate the interests of its clients and to enroll them into his specific concept of an cloud based ERP technology. Through the introduction of this technology, individual practices and relations within client organizations are renegotiated through new potentials and restrictions of the software system. At the same time, the ERP technology itself is reshaped through needed adaptation towards the clients individual sociotechnical environment and through the formation of new features and functions in user practice driven design processes.

Through the high level of flexibility of this software, ideas of categories like "developer", "user" and even "competitor" together with ideas of "success" or "failure" of enrollment strategies become equally flexible. In addition, the boundaries in regards of knowledge transfer between otherwise unrelated organizations are blurred through the cloud based architecture of the software. This is the case if features and functions developed with a specific local user become equally available for the other users, offering the potential of transfer (and transformation) of business practices between individual organizations.