Abstract
Higher education has been strongly influenced by global trends to adopt new technologies. There has been a call by governments for universities worldwide to improve their performance and efficiency. In response, higher education institutions have turned to Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERP) in order to cope with the changing environment and overcome the limitations of legacy systems as a means for integration and performance improvement advantages. However, failure rate of ERP implementation is high and debate still exists regarding the various contributions of the ERP systems to performance, especially at the user level, where the core values of information systems are represented and the actual benefits and impacts are created.
As consequence, this study evaluates the impacts of ERP systems on user performance in higher education institutions with a view to better understand ERP phenomenon in these institutions and determine whether or not these systems work well in such a complex environment. The study also developed and validated statistically a new model suggesting a more inclusive sight for examining ERPs utilization and impacts and combining the key ideas of three well-known and widely used information systems models.