A NEW IT ORGANIZATIONAL FORM FOR MULTINATIONAL ENTERPRISES

Abstract Globalization has been a major phenomenon since the 1980s. As many multinational enterprises (MNEs

How to Design an IT Department? A Review and Synthesis of Key Characteristics

The design of an IT department received much attention during the last years. CIOs and IT managers still have a great interest how they can set up their IT department. Previous research discusses various key characteristics or even delivers archetypes of the IT department. However, a synoptic view of the screws CIOs can set, is still missing. Subsequently, the aim of the present paper is to synthesize existing literature in order to gain an overview about the key characteristics of an IT department. To that end, a systematic literature review was conducted. The paper contributes a set of nine characteristics grouped along three dimensions: organizational, technological, and human dimension. The nature of the IT artifacts deployed by the IT department as well as the real net output ratio of the IT function were identified as important characteristics, which were not addressed by existing typologies of IT departments

A Process Model for Public Sector It Management to Answer the Needs of Digital Transformation

While organizations get prepared for digitalization, so must their IT departments. This means they have to increase their agility to respond to varying requests from different groups of users, increase infrastructure flexibility, and improve the utilization of the current resources. To answer these needs, traditional approaches and modes of IT management are often insufficient. We consequently propose a process model for public sector IT departments so that they can adjust their operations as a response to digitalization efforts, for example, smart cities and digital transformation. Our focus is especially on improving the IT development process within the organization, i.e., how the IT department can better respond to the needs of business units. Our findings show that the adjustments require changes both in management and daily operations. Moreover, changes should not be done only internally within the IT department, but also the whole organization should be involved

Application of social capital theory to examine the relationship between IT-business alignment and organizational performance outcomes in health care

Health care organizations are facing increasing challenges as they strive to keep pace with evolving service delivery and reimbursement models. In this context, the effective use of Information Technology (IT) is widely acknowledged as a critical factor for achieving the quadruple aim of health care: better outcomes, lower cost, improved patient experience, and improved clinician experience. Even so, health care organizations have struggled to develop effective working relationships between IT and business units and there remains a dearth of research on the impact that the quality of the relationship between IT and business employees has on organizational performance outcomes. Applying social capital theory, the purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which the quality of the relationship between IT and non-IT employees is correlated with organizational performance outcomes in a hospital setting. Hypothesized relationships between the structural, cognitive, and relational dimensions of the social capital and intellectual capital were examined. Multi-level SEM path analysis was employed to analyze survey data from 143 IT Field Service workers who provide services in one of the 34 hospitals within a single health system in the western United States. Multivariate and ordinary least squares linear regression was used to investigate the relationship between intellectual capital (aggregated by hospital, N = 34) and extant data from four hospital performance metrics: hospital quality, employee productivity, patient length of stay, and patient satisfaction. A positive correlation was observed between structural and cognitive dimensions of social capital (Std. β = 0.550, p = 0.003), cognitive and relational dimensions of social capital (Std. β = 0.581, p = 0.001), and between the cognitive dimension of social capital and intellectual capital (Std. β = 0.643, p = 0.001). Intellectual capital was positively correlated with employee productivity (Std. β = 0.468, p = 0.005) and negatively correlated with patient length of stay (Std. β = -0.422, p = 0.032). These correlational results provide direction for future experimental research and offer guidance for health care IT leaders as they examine whether the development of structural and social capital between IT and non-IT employees has a casual impact on hospital performance

A New IT Organizational form for Multinational Enterprises

Globalization has been a major phenomenon since the 1980s. As many multinational enterprises (MNEs) grow their presence globally, they have been supported by distributed IT resources that are organized either as centralized IT, decentralized IT, or federated IT. However, despite the significant increase in business complexity in the last decade, there has been relatively little systematic research on new IT organizational forms capable of coping with the sophistication of today’s complex (e.g., multi-strategy, multi-product, and multi-geography) MNEs. Drawing from our understanding of the development of organization form in the organization design literature, we examine the applicability of a contemporary organization form, i.e., the multidimensional organization (Ackoff 1999; Galbraith 2009; Strikwerda & Stoelhorst 2009) to the organizing of IT function in MNEs. Through a revelatory case study of the global IT organization at Siemens, we demonstrate the possibility of a multidimensional design for IT organization in MNEs, where the IT organization is organized into IT Customer-, IT Product-, and IT Resource units. The strategic application of lean and flexible lateral coordination mechanisms enables the multidimensional IT organization to achieve multiple objectives in totality. Implications for research and practices are discussed