Strategic information planning: Insights from an action research project in the financial services industry

The core purpose of strategic information planning (SIP) lies in identifying future directions for investments in information technology, information systems and information supply that will assist an organisation to realise its business goals. SIP is a critical challenge and major concern to both academics and practitioners, in particular consultants. While the latter have proposed a number of formal methodologies and principles of good practice, these are normative recommendations that are hardly justified through theoretical insight. In fact, SIP is yet to be well understood theoretically and requires more empirical support. This motivated us to carry out an in depth case study on SIP in a financial service company. The study aimed at improving the SIP practices in place and was conducted in an action research-like manner. This research report at hand presents the results of the study. We firstly describe the enterprise, its situation and the SIP practices in place. We then reflect upon the SIP process, its contingencies and its outcome in light of the current academic literature. This leads us to a number of theoretically informed suggestions that concern the improvement of SIP as well as the direction of the resulting information strategy. These suggestions have already been debated with senior IT executives from the case enterprise. This debate helped to confirm some theoretical propositions from literature while other recommendations were not agreed upon by the practitioners. Our findings from the study are finally framed to give a fresh impetus to future research and perhaps challenge some current wisdom

Strategic Information Planning – Insights from an Action Research Project in the Financial Services Industry

The core purpose of strategic information planning (SIP) lies in identifying future directions for investments in information technology, information systems and information supply that will assist an organisation to realise its business goals. SIP is a critical challenge and major concern to both academics and practitioners, in particular consultants. While the latter have proposed a number of formal methodologies and principles of good practice, these are normative recommendations that are hardly justified through theoretical insight. In fact, SIP is yet to be well understood theoretically and requires more empirical support. This motivated us to carry out an in depth case study on SIP in a financial service company. The study aimed at improving the SIP practices in place and was conducted in an action research-like manner. This research report at hand presents the results of the study. We firstly describe the enterprise, its situation and the SIP practices in place. We then reflect upon the SIP process, its contingencies and its outcome in light of the current academic literature. This leads us to a number of theoretically informed suggestions that concern the improvement of SIP as well as the direction of the resulting information strategy. These suggestions have already been debated with senior IT executives from the case enterprise. This debate helped to confirm some theoretical propositions from literature while other recommendations were not agreed upon by the practitioners. Our findings from the study are finally framed to give a fresh impetus to future research and perhaps challenge some current wisdom. <br

A Literature Overview on Strategic Information Systems Planning

Strategic Information Systems Planning (SISP) has been among the highest ranked issues on management agendas for many years. As such, SISP should be a major concern for researchers as well. However, SISP does not play that important of a role in the academic discussion, at least in Germany. Leading German textbooks on Information Management devote only small sections to strategy themes. Moreover, the recommendations given for conducting SISP in these textbooks are mainly normative and hardly take international research findings into account. Taking this as a motivation, we conducted a comprehensive literature review of German and Anglo-American information systems journals. Our objective was to understand more fully what we know about SISP through international research. On the flip side, our research aims at identifying fields that are in urgent need for closer academic investigation so that individual speculations and normative recommendations might still substitute for valid research insights. Overall, we found a considerable amount of research conducted in the field of SISP that we organised in five broad thematic fields: Strategic IT impact, approaches to SISP, information systems strategy, and strategic alignment. We give a short overview of research conducted so far and seminal publications available in the research fields. Moreover, based on a sub-sample of our literature base, we compute statistics which indicate the intensity of the academic discussion in the different thematic fields over time. Our statistics show that most attention has been paid to the competitive use of IT. The IS strategy in contrast has only been of limited interest, though it is central to any strategic considerations in IS. Our survey also suggests that German speaking researchers have devoted relatively few efforts to SISP in comparison to their Anglo-American colleagues

Designing and executing digital strategies : completed research paper

The digital economy poses existential threats to — and game-changing opportunities for — companies that were successful in the pre-digital economy. What will distinguish those companies that successfully transform from those that become historical footnotes? This is the question a group of six researchers and consultants from Boston Consulting Group set out to examine. The team conducted in-depth interviews with senior executives at twenty-seven companies in different industries to explore the strategies and organizational initiatives they relied on to seize the opportunities associated with new, readily accessible digital technologies. This paper summarizes findings from this research and offers recommendations to business leaders responsible for digital business success

Towards a Comprehensive Model of Information Strategy

Strategic information planning is an important topic in practice as well as in research. Work so far has focused mainly on the planning process itself rather than on the actual information strategy as its output. The paper points out different approaches to substantiating the concept of information strategy with perhaps the most advanced approach being the system of plans approach. However, existing approaches are not satisfactory regarding their structure, completeness and rationales. We propose a more comprehensive model of information strategy that is argued to overcome the deficiencies of the existing approaches. Our model introduces the concepts of information infrastructure and information function. It helps to clarify ongoing discussions devoted to information strategy as a functional departmental strategy, to strategic alignment as well as to the role of the CIO and allows the integration of separate views on information strategy from different discipline

Information strategy – research and reality

Strategic information planning and its output, the information strategy, are relevant topics in practice as well as in research. However, current research provides neither a clear nor a consistent picture regarding the concept of information strategy. While unsatisfactory in itself, research in such a state probably also fails to provide practitioners with guidance in developing information strategies. Since practitioners nevertheless widely discuss about information strategy e.g. in practitioner magazines and conferences, the question arises how practitioners understand information strategy. In exploratory interviews, we confirmed a disconnection between research and practice and identified five types of information strategy concepts: Information strategy is understood as a binding guideline, a departmental plan, a change agenda, the market strategy of the IT department or as a set of business unit overarching IT issues. The value of analysing these concepts in practice lies in revealing reasons for the disconnection between research and reality as well as potentially providing a fresh impetus for information strategy research in order to eventually improve the discontenting state of research