Effect of IT Skills on IT Capabilities and IT-Business Alignment

How to create competitive advantage through information technology (IT) in the turbulent environment is an important issue to most organizations. This study contributes to the information systems (IS) literatures by help gaining a greater understanding of whether and how IT skills that an IT department possesses influence the firm’s IT capabilities and IT-business alignment. This study proposes a theoretical model to investigate how soft skills and hard skills of the IT department influence a firm’s IT capabilities, and how these IT capabilities in turn affect its IT-business alignment. The study identifies three IT capabilities related to the IS development context: IT-user collaboration, IT adaptability, and IT innovativeness. The empirical data collected from 120 IT directors showed that both soft IT skills and hard IT skills positively affect the three IT capabilities simultaneously, IT adaptability and IT-user collaboration significantly affect the IT-business alignment, and IT-user collaboration has significant effect on IT adaptability. Yet the result failed to support the role of IT innovativeness in facilitating IT-business alignment, nor the effect of IT-user collaboration on IT innovativeness. Our findings confirm the importance of IT-related resources and capabilities possessed by the IT department. The implications and limitations of this study are provided

Looking for efective ways of achieving and sustaining Business-IT Alignment

Aligning Business and Information Technologies strategies has been a subject studied for a long time. Despite all the efforts, achieving and sustaining Business-IT alignment remains a challenge requiring even more agility nowadays to keep up with the competition in a turbulent organizational environment. Past contributions are uncovered in this paper calling particular attention to the development of Enterprise Architecture as a way of addressing this challenge. However, this should be a process to be carried out in the most effective ways looking especially at time and costs. Having proposed frameworks as a point of departure to reflect on the ways they may or may not work in practice, a dialogical action research is proposed for this work involving a close interaction with consultant companies. The resulting improved expertise both from the researcher and practitioners involved should allow for the identification of the most effective ways of achieving and sustaining Business-IT alignment.(undefined

Issues in front-end decision-making on projects

The importance of the front-end decision-making phase in projects is being increasingly recognized - the need to do the right project is on a par with doing the project right. This area is underrepresented in the literature, but there are a number of key themes that run throughout, identifying key issues or difficulties during this stage. This article looks at some of these themes and includes: the need for alignment between organizational strategy and the project concept; dealing with complexity, in particular the systemicity and interrelatedness within project decisions; consideration of the ambiguity implicit in all major projects; taking into account psychological and political biases within estimation of benefits and costs; consideration of the social geography and politics within decision-making groups; and preparation for the turbulence within the project environment, including the maintenance of strategic alignment

Supply Chain Information Systems and Organisational Performance in Economic Turbulent Times

Supply Chain Information Systems and their impact on organisational performance has been studied by a number of studies. This study seeks to extend this body of knowledge by adopting a fresh lens to explore empirically the relationship between organizational performance and SCIS in circumstances of economic downturn and financial turbulence. The statistical relationship between Supply Chain Information Systems (SCIS) ˜Effectiveness and ˜Organisational Performance is tested and measured by multidimensional financial and non-financial variables. So even though complexities associated with measuring SCIS efficiency and Organisational Performance continue to dominate research discussions these are somewhat limited to just explaining the phenomenon without addressing the misalignment of the information provided by SCIS, business expectations and Organisational Performance. In consequence this papers reports findings from a large survey of 168 SCIS managers in Greek SMEs where even through economic downturn a strong correlation between SCIS and non-financial Organisational Performance is evidenced. In considering the findings this study proposes guidance to enhance SCIS Effectiveness and Organisational Performance

Mindfully Resisting the Bandwagon – IT Implementation and Its Consequences in the Financial Crisis

Although the ”financial meltdown” between 2007 and 2009 can be substantially attributed to herding behaviour in the subprime market for credit default swaps, a “mindless” IT implementation of participating financial services providers played a major role in the facilitation of the underlying bandwagon. The problem was a discrepancy between two core complementary capabilities: (1.) the (economic-rationalistic) ability to execute financial transactions (to comply with the herd) in milliseconds and (2.) the required contextualized mindfulness capabilities to comprehend the implications of the transactions being executed and the associated IT innovation decisions that enabled these transactions

The impact of information technology resources on SMEs' innovation performance

This work aims to develop a research framework to examine the impact of information technology resources on the innovation performance of Saudi small-and-medium enterprises (SMEs). SMEs innovation capability influences growth and technological progress (Bruque & Moyano, 2007). However, many developing countries exhibit moderate or even low innovation performance. For instance, Saudi Arabia is ranked 54th by the Global Innovation Index (GII 2011). Innovation systems studies focus on the alignment between the interactions of innovation actors with their constantly changing environment toward better innovation performance (Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff, 2000). The dynamic capabilities of organisations have been highlighted as a crucial characteristic that helps to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage (Teece et al., 1997). The indirect impact IT resources on innovation performance represents an attractive research area (Benitez-Amado et al., 2010). Therefore, we argue that a closer look at Saudi SMEs information technology resources and their impact on the firm dynamic capabilities and innovation performance would make a significant contribution to existing knowledge. Areas such as the organisation strategies of developing countries, innovation management, dynamic capabilities, open innovation and strategic information systems are few examples of areas that might benefit from this work

Baan Company’s Corporate Web Strategy – An Effort To Reach Main Street

During the 1990s Baan Company became a market leader in the enterprise applications industry. Its mission was to become an independent software manufacturer, serving a global market. To speed up growth, Baan developed its Baan Web strategy which implied a far-reaching renewal of its corporate strategy. Burgelman and Grove (1996) define the moment of choosing a new strategy as a strategic inflection point. Their framework named “Dynamic Forces in Firm Evolution†explains that ssuccessful development and implementation of a new corporate strategy is a process of aligning five dynamic forces. The focus of this study is on the vital role of the internal selection environment. This force regulates the allocation of the company’s scarce resources – cash, competences/capabilities and senior management attention – to strategic action. It is the crucial force in the continuing alignment processes that have to take place. Every company has a unique combination of distinctive competences (Burgelman) or dynamic capabilities (Teece). The study explains that to execute a new strategy successfully new competences/capabilities have to be developed based on existent ones. The development of Baan’s corporate strategy is analyzed and discussed with reference to the Technology Adoption Life Cycle (Moore). The study concludes with the management implications of a strategic inflection point.globalization;growth;dynamic capabilities;ERP;software;business web;corporate strategy;distinctive competences;strategic inflection point

Integrating diversity management initiatives with strategic human resource management

Managing diversity is usually viewed in broad conceptual terms as recognising and valuing differences among people; it is directed towards achieving organisational outcomes and reflects management practices adopted to improve the effectiveness of people management in organisations (Kramar 2001; Erwee, Palamara & Maguire 2000). The purpose of the chapter is to examine the debate on how diversity management initiatives can be integrated with strategic human resource management (SHRM), and how SHRM is linked to organisational strategy. Part of this debate considers to what extent processes associated with managing diversity are an integral part of the strategic vision of management. However, there is no consensus on how a corporate strategic plan influences or is influenced by SHRM, and how the latter integrates diversity management as a key component. The first section of the chapter addresses the controversy about organisations as linear, steady state entities or as dynamic, complex and fluid entities. This controversy fuels debate in the subsequent sections about the impact that such paradigms have on approaches to SHRM. The discussion on SHRM in this chapter will explore its links to corporate strategy as well as to diversity management. Subsequent sections propose that managing diversity should address sensitive topics such as gender, race and ethnicity. Finally, attention is given to whether an integrative approach to SHRM can be achieved and how to overcome the obstacles to making this a reality