Environmental modelling of the Chief Information Officer

Since the introduction of the term in the 1980’s, the role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) has been widely researched. Various perceptions and dimensions of the role have been explored and debated. However, the explosion in data proliferation (and the inevitable resulting information fuelled change) further complicates organisational expectations of the CIOs role. If organisations are to competitively exploit the digital trend, then those charged with recruiting and developing CIOs now need to be more effective in determining (and shaping) CIO traits and attributes, within the context of their own organisational circumstances and in line with stakeholder expectations. CIOs also need to determine their own suitability and progression within their chosen organisation if they are to remain motivated and effective. Before modelling the role of the future CIO, it is necessary to synthesise our current knowledge (and the lessons learnt) about the CIO. This paper, therefore, aims to identify and summate the spectrum of key researched ‘themes’ pertaining to the role of the CIO. Summating previous research, themes are modelled around four key CIO ‘dimensions’, namely (1) Impacting factors, (2) Controlling factors (3) Responses and (4) CIO ‘attributes’. Having modelled the CIOs current environment, and recognising the evolving IT enabled information landscape, the authors call for further research to inform the recruitment and development of the future CIO in terms of personal attributes and the measurable impact such attributes will have on their respective organisation

The Role of the CIO and the CDO in an Organization’s Digital Transformation

The CIO role often embodies both strategic as well as operational elements. However, the penetration of digital technologies into nearly every aspect of business has led many firms to create the role of a Chief Digital Officer (CDO) to oversee the establishment of digital capabilities in the company. This development has the potential for considerable redundancy between CIO and CDO roles and brings the CIO role to an inflection point. Through multiple interviews with executives of 19 firms, seven of which have a CDO, this paper explores the reasoning behind the CDO role, the need for which is often driven by digitization pressure, demand for organizational orchestration, aspects of the CIO role profile, and the digitization focus areas of the company. Moreover, this paper identifies four distinct CDO role-types (Evangelist, Coordinator, Innovator, and Advocate) and assesses the implications for the CIO role in the context of digital transformation

Information Technology and the Search for Organizational Agility: A Systematic Review with Future Research Possibilities

Organizations are increasingly turning to information technology (IT) to help them respond to unanticipated environmental threats and opportunities. In this paper, we introduce a systematic review of the literature on IT-enabled agility, helping to establish the boundary between what we know and what we don’t know. We base our review on a wide body of literature drawn from the AIS Basket of Eight IT journals, a cross-section of non-Basket journals, IT practitioner outlets, and premier international IS conferences. We review the use of different theoretical lenses used to investigate the relationship between IT and organizational agility and how the literature has conceptualized agility, its antecedents, and consequences. We also map the evolution of the literature through a series of stages that highlight how researchers have built on previous work. Lastly, we discuss opportunities for future research in an effort to close important gaps in our understanding

A conceptual framework for capability sourcing modeling

Companies need to acquire the right capabilities from the right source, and the right shore, at the right cost to improve their competitive position. Capability sourcing is an organizing process to gain access to best-in-class capabilities for all activities in a firm's value chain to ensure long-term competitive advantage. Capability sourcing modeling is a technique that helps investigating sourcing alternative solutions to facilitate strategic sourcing decision making. Our position is applying conceptual models as intermediate artifacts which are schematic descriptions of sourcing alternatives based on organization's capabilities. The contribution of this paper is introducing a conceptual framework in the form of five views (to organize all perspectives) and a conceptualisation (to formulate a language) for capability sourcing modelling

The creation of business architecture heat maps to support strategy-aligned organizational decisions

The realization of strategic alignment within the business architecture has become increasingly important for companies. Indeed, it facilitates business-IT alignment as a well-designed business architecture helps both to identify the appropriate requirements for IT systems and to discover new business opportunities that can be realized by IT. However, there is a lack of alignment techniques that support organizational (re) design decisions during the operation phase as the actual performance of business architecture elements is neglected. Capability heat maps provide a useful starting point in this respect as they focus on the creation of a hierarchy of prioritized capabilities, which are characterized by a performance measure. In this paper, these techniques will be extended to support strategy-aligned decisions within the business architecture. The identification of the relevant business architecture elements is based on state-of-the-art enterprise modelling languages, which enable the development of enterprise models on distinct layers of the business architecture. Strategic alignment between these elements will be realized by using prioritization according to the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), while performance measurement will enable the creation of a proper decision support system. Afterwards, the proposed heat map will be applied on a case example to illustrate its potential use. This results in the completion of a first build-and-evaluate loop within the Design Science methodology