hanced, which resulted in a mass
market for many software application
types. In addition, software producers
had enough resources to make their
software even more general-purpose
oriented with larger feature sets that
were organized into a product. 8
Software became even more standardized,
and in the process, many local markets
were annexed into global markets. For
example, word processing software
was no longer produced specifically
for a particular profession or industry
or nation; 26 instead, an almost universal office suite emerged, such as,
Microsoft Office. The generalized software products could be configured in
various ways (for example, program
parameters, macro functionality, language support, and so on) to suit special needs among customers. These
highly configurable general purpose
software products came to be known
as software packages. 23
Until recently in the IS academic
community, there has been a tendency to focus on traditional studies
of software development and implementation of large custom-made systems. 20, 24 This has been despite the
leading trend that organizations use
“shrink wrapped” systems31 where the
core functionalities of the software are
identical across all implementations
in dozens, thousands or even millions
of different organizations. 15 When
it comes to managing the process of
identifying and evaluating packages,
the IS academic community has been
almost silent.
The aim of this article is to provide
practitioners with a grounded set of
principles to guide the selection of
software packages. By principles, we
mean a set of fundamental ideas that
summarize important insights in software package acquisition that are not
(yet) embedded into the practice of
buying software. The principles are interdependent and together they form a
whole that is larger than the sum of the
parts. Similar to Klein and Myers’ argument, 19 the use of all principles is not
mandatory, but in each case it must be
judged whether, how, and which principles apply to a specific situation.
Packaged Software
Packaged software is a category of
information systems for which all
implementations are essentially iden-
tical; that is, the main functionalities
are common to all adopters. While
the core components of a package
are identical across all user organiza-
tions, the implementation into an in-
dividual organizational information
infrastructure is usually configured in
some manner to fit the requirements
of the organization. 1, 17, 22 For the pur-
pose of this article, we define a stan-
dard software package as: a collection
of software components which when
combined perform a set of generalized
tasks that are applicable to a range
of users. As a package is adopted by
many, it forms a standard because the
core components are identical across
all of its installations. The software
package may be configured or custom-
ized to make it fit with specific require-
ments unique to the concrete imple-
mentation. This is accomplished by
setting program parameters, install-
ing add-on modules, or building in-
terfaces with other software systems.
Within an organization, the growing
importance of system interconnec-
tions means the choice of software
package has wide ripple effects for
other parts of the organization whose
software packages, implementations,
and interests may not originally have
been identified or considered in the
decision process regarding a new soft-
ware acquisition.
