A Social Linkage View on the Business Value of IT

Our research intends to explore whether a social perspective on IT business alignment can help shed light on the IT value creation process by considering different facets of interpersonal linkage. In this paper, we develop a theoretical model which could be discussed at the JAIS workshop. Further, we use some empirical data from 149 US banks in order to find first empirical evidence whether our research focus represents a promising direction. We find initial support for our main hypotheses that communication, cross-domain knowledge and mutuality among and between IT and business staff significantly impact IT usage and business process outcomes. The final results of our research could contribute to our understanding of how the IT resource should be understood and used to measurably contribute to firm goals. The initial findings support the caveat of recent studies suggesting that informal aspects of alignment might be quite notable (e.g. Chan, 2002) and show that our theoretical understanding of alignment should be extended to better incorporate social aspects of daily work life

Getting Ready for Success: May Alignment Be of Help?

What is the role of organizational readiness and IT business alignment in the adoption process of an ITsupported interorganizational linkage (IOL)? In this paper, we claim that achieving a proper level of organizational readiness is crucial for the successful adoption of IOL. We thus focus on intraorganizational factors that potentially impact the effectiveness of preparatory ac tivities towards getting ready for the adoption and implementation of an IOL. By drawing upon results from alignment and adoption of innovations literatures, we develop and theoretically underpin a model that illustrates the moderating impact of IT business alignment on the initiation and implementation stages of the IOL adoption process

Mastering the Social IT/Business Alignment Challenge

The crucial role of IT/business alignment for business value of IT has been investigated for more than two decades. While both the intellectual and the social dimension of alignment received considerable attention at strategic level, only few studies have provided insights into alignment at non-strategic levels. With the intellectual dimension being quite well understood, this work focuses particularly on the social dimension of alignment, addressing aspects like shared understanding, common language, shared domain knowledge, and interaction quality between business and IT. Furthermore, there is a lack of research on how to achieve and maintain social alignment, making it difficult to develop guidelines for practice in this important area. This paper presents a multi-level construct for social alignment and adopts an IT governance perspective in order to identify specific practices and investigate their impact on social alignment. Using a qualitative approach by conducting a series of case studies, this research aims to contribute to our understanding of key IT/business alignment antecedents (or managerial actions) and how they influence social alignment

Who is Doing What: The Impact of Task and Role Documentation on Outsourcing Service Quality

Our research contributes to the quest for management action items that drive outsourcing management success. We hypothesize and empirically show that a certain piece of IT governance, the explicit documentation of roles and responsibilities of staff residing in the client firm’s retained organization contributes to social alignment in terms of interaction quality, shared knowledge, and trust between the client firm’s business and side and the outsourcing vendor. Our model is quantitatively tested by using data from 171 IT outsourcing arrangements in the German banking industry. We show that the documentation of tasks and responsibilities affects the service quality delivered by the vendor in terms of reliability and responsiveness, and that this impact is fully mediated by both client-internal social alignment and vendor/client alignment. This result represents a piece for helping practitioners to develop a better understanding of how to design their outsourcing governance to maintain and improve ongoing outsourcing relationships

Bundling of Information Goods - Past, Present and Future

Bundling of information goods (such as software and digitized music or TV) is omnipresent in today’s business-to-consumer environment. However, a surprisingly small number of articles address this issue within the information systems science (ISS) literature. By conducting a thorough literature review on the subject, this article shows that a lion’s share of the most important work on information technology product bundling is published outside the ISS arena. On the basis of the literature review, eight future research directions are presented

Comparing the Operational Integration of a Core Information System in Insourcing and Outsourcing Firms

IT business alignment is widely acknowledged as an important driver for effectively applying information systems in a business context and for increasing the performance of the supported business process. But how does this structural integration of enterprise systems and business processes change when firms outsource the provision of their IT? We empirically compare how the value impact of structural IT business alignment on core financial processes in banks with an internal IT is different from banks that have their enterprise systems outsourced. It turns out that outsourcing substantially changes the ways operational alignment influences business process performance

The Role of Corporate Cultural Similarity for Outsourcing Relationship Quality and Outsourcing Success

What is the impact of corporate cultural similarity (CCS) on outsourcing success? In this paper, we use data from a survey with the largest 1,000 banks in Germany to show that CCS has a substantial effect on outsourcing success which is mainly mediated by different dimensions of outsourcing relationship quality. The more comparable the corporate cultures of the vendor firm and the client firm, the higher is the outsourcing success from the client’s perspective. Finally, we highlight our future steps of research in investigating the impact of particular types of corporate culture in an IT outsourcing context