Parallel adoption
The process requires careful planning and control and a significant investment in labor hours.
Additionally, a process-data model is utilized to visualize the process, aiming to offer a comprehensive overview of all the steps involved in parallel adoption.
The choice for a specific adoption method depends on the organizational characteristics; more insight on this topic will be provided below.
Additionally, if the system relies on commercial off-the-shelf technology (COTS) and the vendor's documentation specifies that multiple applications cannot share the same database, parallel conversion may not be feasible.
Similarly, other COTS products may have limitations when it comes to patches or major upgrades that require unique license keys, potentially causing issues with database changes and system functionality.
In principle, the parallel adoption method is different from the decision to change a system in an organization and can be seen as one possible mean to achieve that goal.
Also an organized and disciplined approach to accomplish a task, e.g., a failure reporting system (ISO 9000) The parallel adoption is preceded with determining the implementation strategy, which is not unique for parallel adoption, but can be seen as part of the change management process that an organization enters.
Besides a good preparation of the (extra) personnel, that has to go through a stressful period of parallel running where procedures cross each other.
(Rooijmans, 2003, Eason, 1988) Efforts should be placed on data-consistency and preventing data corruption between the two systems.
When the organization demands heavily on the old (legacy) system to be changed, the trade-off between extra involved costs for a less risky parallel approach, should be in favour of those extra costs (Lee, 2004), despite this, we see that ERP adoption follows a big bang adoption in most cases (Microsoft, 2004, Yusuf, 2004).
For parallel adoption, the most important IT requirement (if applicable) is attention for running the two systems simultaneously.
Besides the IT-requirements, the organizational requirements require Human Resource Management issues like, the training of personnel, deal with a perhaps changing organizational structure, organic organisation or Mechanistic organisation characteristics of the organization (Daft, 1998) and most importantly: Top management support (Brown, Vessey, 1999).
Brown et al. (1999) identify two distinct roles top management can initiate: the so-called sponsor and champion roles: A parallel adoption process is very stressful and requires well prepared employees that can deal with mistakes that are being made, without conservatively eager to the old system.
In this case, concepts as company image and reputation can drastically change if customers are faced with more delays in for example communication or ordering goods.
It is suggested that if the system is politically sensitive, more attention should be paid to the conversion method and preferably parallel adoption is opted, since there is less risk involved.
they seem to fit perfectly with the issues mentioned for a generic parallel adoption process, based on a combination of scientific work.
To summarise: There are also at least two difficulties with parallel conversion that may make its use impractical in the 21st century, though it was a staple of industry practice when inputs consisted of decks of punched cards or reels of tape.
It is impractical to expect end users, be they customers, production line workers or nearly anyone else, to enter every transaction twice via different interfaces.
As a result, parallel conversion is restricted to a few specific situations today, such as accounting systems where absolute verifiability of results is mandatory, where users are all internal to the organization and understand this requirement, and where the order of activities cannot be allowed to affect the output.
