Social capital influence on supply chain integration in the food processing industry in Malaysia / Zurita Mohd Saleh

Supply chain integration has been established as one of the key factors in influencing supply chain effectiveness. In relation to the food processing industry, the need to integrate supply chain initiatives has become more critical as those involved in the food processing and distribution industry are deemed key players whose roles are pertinent in determining supply chain success. Drawing upon the importance of integration, this study establishes the link between supply chain social capital constructs with integration. Based on a final sample size of 184 food manufacturers, a survey was conducted to determine the influence of supply chain relational capital, supply chain structural and supply chain cognitive on the integration of the food processing supply chain. The findings reveal that all three dimensions of supply chain social capital exert significant influence on supply chain integration, thus indicating the importance and relevance of integration among members in the food processing industry. With such findings, the study establishes that both structural and relational elements are of significant importance in ensuring the achievement of ultimate business performance. Although the study has not directly relate supply chain integration with business performance, the direction of the study is substantial to postulate that such relationships is possible and this therefore will be the direction of future study

A Literature Review of Business/IT Alignment Strategies

AbstractIn the last years, the alignment issue was addressed in several researches and numerous methods, techniques and tools were proposed. Indeed, the business and IT performance are tightly coupled, and enterprises cannot be competitive if their business and IT strategies are not aligned. This paper proposes a literature review useful for evaluating different alignment approaches, with the aim of discovering similarity, maturity, capability to measure, model, asses and evolve the alignment level existing among business and technological assets of an enterprise. The proposed framework is applied to analyse the alignment research published in the Information & Management journal and the Journal of Strategic Information Systems, that are the ones that more published on this topic. The achieved evaluation results are presented

HOW BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE CREATES VALUE

Assessing IT business value has long been recognized as a major challenge, stemming largely from the considerable variability in the role and contribution of IT. This study examines the business value associated with business intelligence (BI) systems, suggesting that business value assessment is largely contingent on system type and should consider its unique contribution. The study adopts a process-oriented approach to evaluating the value contribution of BI, arguing that it stems from the improvement of business processes. The study develops and tests a research model that explains the unique mechanisms through which BI creates business value. The model draws on the resource-based view to identify key resources and capabilities that determine the impact of BI on business processes and, consequently, on organizational performance. Furthermore, the research model seeks to analyse the manner in which the organizational approach to innovation moderates the business value of BI. Analysis of data collected from 159 managers and IT/BI experts, using Structural Equations Modelling (SEM) techniques, shows that BI largely contributes to business value by improving both operational and strategic business processes. Further, it highlights the effect of the organizational approach toward exploration on transforming BI resources into capabilities and further into business value

IT Service Management Revisited – Insights from Seven Years of Action Research

A reliable IT infrastructure and smoothly running IT applications are nowadays essential to every organization. Hence, the field of IT Operations Management (ITOM) has drawn much attention in practice. However, this field has hardly been subjected to academic research in the past. Therefore, organizations that are willing to professionalise their IT operations have to rely on industry standards rather than well-reasoned recommendations from academia. The predominant approach taken to ITOM in these standards is that of IT service management (ITSM). But the ideas and concepts associated with ITSM have hardly been evaluated by research so far. We have addressed this shortfall in five action research projects. This paper reports on three of these projects which had the objective in common to introduce ITSM to the organisation and that all build on four ITSM core concepts: the IT service, the IT service portfolio, the IT service catalogue, and IT service cost accounting and pricing. We found that these concepts were difficult to implement in the organisations we studied. While some of the difficulties might be due to organisational peculiarities, we found strong indications for problems being inherent to these concepts. These lead us to call for more academic attention to be paid to ITOM in general and the ITSM approach in particular. We also put forward desiderata for future research

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

Technological Evolution Agility and Dynamic IT Capabilities: A Delphi Study

Robust information technology infrastructures (ITI) are essential for organizations since they are the heart of almost every organization and are considered as key assets that play strategic roles and affect organizational performance. To cope with the effects of technological evolution, IT managers must have an articulated vision of their ITI as well as the ability to acquire, deploy, combine and reconfigure their ITI, i.e. dynamic IT capabilities. However, the underlying organizational actions of dynamic IT capabilities are difficult to identify and to circumscribe. Drawing on a Delphi study involving 29 IT management experts, this study has identified key organizational actions deployed to overcome the challenges related to the constant and rapid technological evolution to be agile. Overall, the experts emphasized the importance of collaboration, competencies, roadmap, standardization and monitoring to overcome the challenges and exploit the opportunities related to the constant and rapid technological evolution while fostering organizational agility

Dynamic Capabilities in Information Systems Research – A Literature Review

Information systems (IS) and digital business strategies are increasingly focal to companies navigating the changing modes of working, collaborating and operating in various networked business settings. Dynamic capabilities (DCs) are often asserted as a key for companies’ attaining sustainable competitive advantage in turbulent and uncertain environments. However, the construct of DCs is utilized in multifarious ways and often researched primarily from a managerial perspective. This makes comprehensive, empirical study of DC development in organizations amorphous and difficult. To address this issue, based on a semi-structured literature review, this paper investigates how DCs are conceptualized in strategic IS literature. Further, the aim is to understand to what extent they have been studied empirically with a multilevel perspective. Firstly, the findings suggest terminology used in defining and explaining DCs is interlaced and tangled. Secondly, the findings point that the suspected gap in multilevel research on DCs within the IS field exists

Antecedents of IT-Business Alignment Factors in Influencing Sustainable Competitive Advantage

More extensive studies on the causal chain between Information Technology (IT) investments and firm performance have been encouraged by scholars. However, the results of empirical studies have been inconclusive. This is partly due to the exclusion of IT - business strategic alignment (known as strategic alignment). In particular, scholars have continuously called for research to address the antecedent factors that lead to the alignment. As a result, this study has successfully developed a causal model illustrating the relationships between strategic alignment antecedents, strategic alignment and sustainable competitive advantage. Specifically, this study has looked into the impact of IT-business strategic alignment antecedents in terms of leadership between business and IT managers, structures and processes between IT plans and business plans and examined IT managerial resources between business and IT managers, service qualities, values and beliefs, and IT implementation success on IT business strategic alignment in terms of alignment gaps. Finally, the impact of IT-business strategic alignment is also tested for its impact on sustainable competitive advantage. In order to explore the above research relationships, this study has utilized the positivism paradigm. Under this method, quantitative data was collected. More specifically, this study has tested the research model by conducting 172 survey questionnaires with public shareholding firms in Jordan. The results obtained from the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique and interviews have offered very valuable insights into the research questions. The results of the main survey questionnaire show strong evidence for the impact of the following variables: leadership, service quality, value and belief, IT managerial resources and IT implementation success, on IT – business strategic alignment. Conversely, SEM has failed to support the link between structure and process on IT business alignment. In addition, the results show strong evidence for the impact of the following: leadership, IT managerial resource and IT implementation success on sustainable competitive advantage. However, SEM failed to support the link between service quality, value and belief, and structure and process on sustainable competitive advantage. Furthermore, the results from the main survey questionnaire show strong evidence for the impact of IT – business strategic alignment on sustainable competitive advantage. Moreover, the results of the main survey questionnaire through the SEM show strong evidence for the mediating effect of strategic alignment on the relationships between value and belief, service quality and sustainable competitive advantage. This study has provided a detailed roadmap that researchers and practitioners can use in order to understand the resources required, and to realize the potential values of their IT investments. Future research is clearly needed to reveal better insights into the nature of these relationships

A Framework for the Impact of IT on Organizational Performance

Purpose – Despite the constant stream of research investigating information technology (IT) business value, IT capabilities, and competitive advantage, researchers are calling for a more coherent understanding of the firm-level impacts of IT, and how those firm-level impacts can be measured. The purpose of this study is to investigate the multitude of organization-level studies of the impact of IT. Design/methodology/approach – Meta-analysis of IS literature from 2001-2009. Findings – The findings are synthesized into an overarching framework of the impact of IT at the organization level. The framework categorizes measures of the impact of IT into productivity, profitability, and intangible benefits, while the antecedents of IT impact are categorized into IT resources, IT capabilities, IT/business alignment and external factors. Originality/value – The research framework proposed provides a comprehensive snapshot of IS studies on organizational performance

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