Literature review

I see that I haven't written anything about my current stage in the DBA, writing the literature review. This is primarily because I had a great deal of difficulty getting started with it. I felt burnt out after the efforts of the research proposal, then I had to deal with continual headaches, a computer which felt the same way as I did and extreme heat. Fortunately I pulled myself together and for the past two weeks I've been working quite hard on the survey.

I am still a bit unclear as to what I am supposed to be doing which is why I am going to read the relevant parts of the IBR2 text again in the next few days. I actually started off by pulling together a history of ERP (and where it is headed) in a similar format to the research proposal. This is material needed for the thesis but not for the literature review. Once this material was completed (at least, to a certain extent), I could then concentrate on the review.

According to my current level of understanding, I am to find as many papers as possible about ERP and feral systems, then write about them critically. I started off with literature surveys, as I already had four papers in my 'library' on this subject. Then I moved onto case studies of ERP implementations - so far, I've found about eight or nine - and then I'll write about case studies of feral systems. Today I found an interesting paper which details an implementation failure. At some stage, I will also have to write about the papers dealing with the psychological aspects.

Fortunately, we are now entering the High Holydays period of the Jewish calendar so I have plenty of time to write about all the papers and get the review into a decent state.