IT Capabilities – Quo Vadis?

The successful management of IT capabilities and their complex interdependencies with other organizational capabilities constitutes an important source of competitive advantage for many organizations today. The role of IT capabilities in enabling competitive actions is well-researched. By reviewing a large number of IT capabilities-focused research articles, the authors seek to answer the questions, “What have we learned? What do we still need to learn?” This research-in-progress article presents key findings regarding IT capabilities, highlighting current research limitations, and providing propositions and recommendations regarding future research

OPERATIONAL BUSINESS-IT MISALIGNMENT AS STRESS FACTOR FOR ORGANIZATIONS

Alignment between business and IT functions is a critical yet unsolved problem of many organizations. Despite considerable amount of research devoted to address this issue, the quest for alignment re-mains challenging, particularly in light of the rapid and widespread digitization of the business world. This paper argues that a research-practice gap exists in the alignment field, and that academic litera-ture fails to discuss key aspects of high practical relevance: alignment as an (emergent) process ra-ther than a state, and operational realities rather than strategic goals. To reduce this gap, we draw on extant alignment research and psychological approach-avoidance theory to develop a model of misa-ligned organizations, emphasizing the need for coordination between strategy and operations and in-vestigating the adverse effects of operational misalignment. Results from two case companies facing operational misalignment provide preliminary confirmation for our propositions and support the call for more practice-oriented research in this highly complex domain

Orchestrating the digital transformation process through a ‘strategy-as-practice’ lens: A revelatory case study

Implementing a digital transformation (DT) strategy constitutes an important challenge for most firms. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in particular must be helped in enacting and managing their DT process. To do so, we aim to answer two research questions: What are the dimensions that define a DT strategy in a SME context? And how do these dimensions contribute to the enactment of a DT process in this context? Using an information systems (IS) strategy-as-practice theoretical lens, combined with an information technology (IT) asset orchestration perspective, we opt for an interpretive case study of an industrial service SME whose characteristics are conducive to a renewed vision of IS strategy in a DT context. From this study emerges a process model that allows us to describe and better understand, in a concrete manner, how a DT occurs and how it is managed through a coherent DT strategy

Information System Strategy for Opportunity Discovery and Exploitation: Insights from Business Model Transformation

For a large enterprise to design a new business model, business managers are unlikely to determine the precise set of choices required to create and capture value. Instead, they are more likely to organize processes to determine the set of choices. Traditionally, an information system (IS) is viewed as the facilitator for opportunity exploitation when a new business model is assumed to be fully formulated; however, when the business model is not fully formulated, the role of the IS as the facilitator for opportunity discovery has been greatly overlooked. Using an in-depth case study of a large enterprise that is designing its next business model, we find that an IS can be used to facilitate opportunity discovery in formulating the narrative and numeric logics of a new business model and can facilitate opportunity exploitation in reconfiguring IS resources

A Co-evolutionary Perspective on Business and IT Alignment: A Review and Research Agenda

Business and IT Alignment (BITA) has received a growing attention during the last decades. Due to increasing environmental and organizational complexities, a co-evolutionary perspective has emerged recently to understand and to control the dynamics in BITA. The Business and IT Co-evolution (BITC) aims to coordinate business and IT through continuous adaptation and learning. A series of BITC studies have been conducted since the 2000s. This study provides an organized review of the current knowledge of this area. Its contribution is threefold: 1) organizing extant literature on BITC, 2) revealing knowledge gaps, and 3) proposing a research agenda

Towards a Complex Adaptive Systems Roadmap for Information Systems Research

Complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory conceptualises a system composed of heterogeneous agents, which interact with each other to adapt to the environment. CAS concepts have been applied in several Information Systems (IS) referent disciplines over the last decade to study complex phenomena in strategic management, social science and organisational research. The application of CAS theory in IS is more recent, wherein researchers have studied complex phenomena including agile processes, systems dynamics and IS alignment. Though CAS has gained some traction with IS researchers, general understanding of the potential of CAS, and its methodological and theoretical applications in IS research, is yet partial and fragmented. The aim of this study is to develop a roadmap for applying CAS in IS research, to analyse the key research objectives with CAS in extant IS research, and to identify methodological and theoretical approaches that researchers follow in conducting CAS-based IS research. To achieve this, we review IS papers published 2002-2014 inclusive in top IS outlets. We analyse the papers based on a supportive theoretical framework and identify eight main objectives of applying CAS, three methodological approaches, and two theoretical approaches related to CAS-based research in the IS discipline. The study reports several valuable observations, including the relative versatility of computational studies over other studies, the minimal use of CAS in design research, methodological triangulation, and theoretical triangulation in IS research. We propose several guidelines for future researchers

The Role of Information Systems in Organizational Improvisation: A Perspective based on Two Complementary Theories

To remain competitive or to simply survive in today’s highly dynamic environments, organizations often need to act rapidly. Top managers deal with urgent issues and must improvise. The role that information systems (IS) play in facilitating improvisation is critical to the organization’s internal processes and market performance. This research-in-progress paper reviews the organizational improvisation literature and examines improvisation using the complementary lenses of organizational learning and dynamic capabilities. It places IS strategy, digital options and IS leveraging capability at the core of the discussion on improvisation. A research model and propositions are presented, as well as the study’s methodology and expected contributions

The Practice Turn In Strategic Alignment Research: Fostering A Strategy-As-Practice Perspective

Strategic Alignment (SA) in the literature has been predominantly envisaged as a result of a formal deliberation process which finds a fit with a particular given strategy. This falls short of acknowledging other social forces that may shape SA and neglects the view that strategy can be emergent. This paper aims to contextualize SA in line with a contemporary perspective in strategy research which draws on practice theory and is widely labelled strategy-as-practice (SAP). We will discuss the motives behind this reorientation, outlining core principles in SAP, and concluding the paper by elaborating the suitability of SAP for the future SA research agenda

IS Agility Research: An Assessment and Future Directions

In this paper, we briefly describe IS agility related research in four established IS research areas: IT infrastructure, IS development, IS organization, and IS personnel. We present a systematic literature review of articles published in leading scientific IS journals during the years 1990-2013. The main contribution of the paper is in the summary of research methods and results of agility related research in the four research streams. Our analysis will provide researchers with a foundation of prior research when designing future studies. Additionally, the paper raises concerns that the dominance of two research streams (i.e., flexible IT infrastructures and agile IS development methods), may overshadow the role of IS personnel characteristics and IS organisation design in agility studies. Future IS agility research could also benefit from studies adopting a broader theoretical perspective to integrate concepts and findings across all four research streams

Strategic Alignment: Towards a Holistic Perspective Embracing Complexity – Advancing the Research Agenda

Strategic alignment has been extensively researched and reviewed. However, the field seems to have reached a stagnant stage in regard to the theoretical, methodological and philosophical foundations employed. In addition, existing research has been criticised due to its inability to capture the messy reality of organisations as well as it being undesirable for firms – as organisations must always change. This paper offers a review of the critique and address them in a constructive manner that reveals the underlying assumptions of which the criticisms are derived. In doing so, new perspective is offered that draws on concepts of complexity theory such as emergence and co-evolution. Special issues have proposed embracing complexity – but the publications to date do not reflect this. Therefore the aim is to offer a stepping stone for further research that builds on the foundation and insights provided by previous alignment research