Leveraging IT for Business Innovation: Does the Role of the CIO Matter?

The evolving role of Information Technology (IT) in business innovation places increasing emphasis on the role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO). Yet, the role of the CIO in business innovation is understudied in the extant literature. Drawing on organizational theory of boundary spanning leadership, we posit that the CIO’s cross-functional role pertaining to entities and functions outside the IT organization help explain the firm’s propensity for IT-enabled business innovation. Our large-sample empirical analysis of U.S. firms largely supports our theoretical propositions. We empirically find that IT-enabled business innovation is more likely when the CIO reports to the Chief Executive Officer, has more interactions with the firm’s customers and is more involved in new product development. This study contributes to our understanding of the role of the CIO in IT-enabled business innovation and provides implications for practice

IT-ENABLED BUSINESS INNOVATION: DOES CIO CAPABILITY MATTER? A PERSPECTIVE FROM INSTITUTIONAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP THEORY

Today IT has evolved from a mere efficiency tool to enabling business innovation and providing strategic value. As the highest level IT leader in organizations, CIO should be largely responsible for the success of IT-enabled business innovation. CIO must possess necessary skills, knowledge, and abilities to lead IT staff, business partners, and even high-level executives in IT-enabled business innovation. However, as IT innovation researchers have just begun to look at business transformation and innovation resulted from the application of new IT, insights on how CIO can leverage IT to enable business innovation are still scant. We aim to address the question of whether and how CIO capability impact on the success of IT-enabled business innovation. Anchoring on the theory of institutional entrepreneurship, we propose a conceptual model describing that CIO’s political savvy, communicative ability, strategic IT and business knowledge have positive impact on the success of ITenabled business innovation, through the mediating role of innovation legitimacy. The findings are expected to provide several theoretical implications for the areas of IT innovation and CIO effectiveness

Business Innovation and Differentiation: Maturing the IT Capability

The IT Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF) determines an organization’s current and desired level of IT capability maturity and supports planning for improvement. Through capability improvement initiatives, organizations can more readily realize sustainable advantages through IT-enabled business innovation and differentiation

Innovation-Driven Enterprise Architecture

Organizations don't use Enterprise Architecture (EA) to leverage innovation as much as they should. And this while the organization's ability to innovate is an essential capability in a competitive market. IT can enable business innovation and EA is rooted in IT. Therefore, IT is considered the common denominator between EA and business innovation. This exploratory research provides new insight to bridge a knowledge gap on how EA can enhance an organization‘s ability in IT-enabled business innovation. It reveals that organizational learning is critical to the innovative capabilities of organizations. With this in mind, the most important capability domains have been determined: Knowledge, Collaboration & communication, Information processing & coordination, and Ideation. To facilitate these capabilities, several technological and organizational assets are identified: Key stakeholders, Collaborative organizational culture, Web technologies, Knowledge management systems, and Data Analytics. We developed a conceptual model which positions the capability domains and key assets. This model has been validated through a case study, conducted within a global manufacturing company. Conclusion is that EA is a viable approach to systematically address and facilitate IT-enabled business innovation. By focusing on the capabilities and facilitating these through organizational and technical assets, organizations can enhance their ability in IT-enabled business innovation

You'll Be Surprised - Digital Business Strategy as Driver of Organizational Innovativeness

The presence of digital infrastructures fundamentally changes market conditions, business and IT strategy, and consequently organizational structures. This research investigates how the concept of a digital business strategy leads to increased organizational innovativeness and firm performance. We demonstrate how IT capabilities contribute to organizational innovativeness and induce the CIO’s positive role for IT-enabled business innovation. By means of an online survey among 228 IT decision makers in knowledge-intensive industries in the U.S., the results reveal organizational innovativeness being significantly higher influenced by the IT knowledge of business employees in organizations giving the digital business strategy high importance, whereas the top management team IT knowledge plays a greater role when digital business strategy is given low priority. By this research, we deliver first results of consequences for organizations conducting a digital business strategy and contribute to the discussion on IT-enabled innovation, CIO leadership, and the increasing relevance of organization-wide IT capabilities

Positioning the IT-CMF: A Capability versus Process Perspective

There is a vast array of IT performance-improving frameworks on the market. So why choose the ITCMF? Well, the first thing to realise is that the IT-CMF is not a replacement for existing frameworks. All good practitioners will tell you, it’s about selecting the right framework for the job. In order to understand the IT-CMF's position in the framework landscape, and its real value to the CIO, we must first explore the different roles capability-centric and process-centric frameworks have in terms of supporting organizational performance

Positioning the IT-CMF: A Capability versus Process Perspective

There is a vast array of IT performance-improving frameworks on the market. So why choose the ITCMF? Well, the first thing to realise is that the IT-CMF is not a replacement for existing frameworks. All good practitioners will tell you, it’s about selecting the right framework for the job. In order to understand the IT-CMF's position in the framework landscape, and its real value to the CIO, we must first explore the different roles capability-centric and process-centric frameworks have in terms of supporting organizational performance

INCREMENTAL INNOVATION BY DESIGN: A DYNAMIC CAPABILITIES PERSPECTIVE (44)

Drawing together knowledge and research from a variety of fields, it is demonstrated that although IT-enabled innovation might be critical to the long-term success of all organisations, it is not an ambition that is always easy to achieve. Consequently, the broad purpose of this short, conceptual paper is to both provide an overview of our proposed, new approach to innovation - Incremental Innovation by Design – and to reflect upon the role dynamic capabilities may have to play in supporting its successful deployment. In so doing, we introduce a provisional research agenda, to indicate how our research interests may be productively developed in the future

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

COLLABORATIVE BEHAVIOURS DRIVING EFFECTIVE INNOVATION: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY (25)

This paper focuses on an imaginative internship programme, named Extreme Blue®, which has been introduced by IBM® to help them identify high potential, future graduate level recruits, by getting teams of internees to work together on practical computing projects, for some of IBM’s key collaborative partners and potential customers1 . The research team were given full access to the Extreme Blue participants, and they used a qualitative research approach, based upon interviews, observations and document reviews, to investigate the nature and effectiveness of the software development approaches that were adopted. The key finding was that the Extreme Blue initiative enabled groups of inexperienced, undergraduate internees, to be melded into effective software development teams, in a very short period of time. Moreover, this exploratory study makes a potentially important contribution to the software development literature by providing important new insights regarding an approach, which can deliver timely and effective software solutions, which are both innovative and have the potential to deliver real business value. The study also makes a potential contribution to the developing literature on graduate recruitment in the IS sphere, by answering the question: how can organisations improve their ability to identify and attract the very best graduate, to be employed in technically-oriented roles