Leveraging business-IT alignment through enterprise architecture—an empirical study to estimate the extents

Achieving business-IT alignment (BITA) as a long-term and appraising management issue can be accomplished in a few ways, enterprise architecture (EA) being one of them. This paper attempts to give a critical understanding of the effects of performing EA on different aspects of BITA maturity through a global survey. A total of 236 respondents from 60 countries, a relatively large response for a survey, were selected. The main purpose of the research is to examine these impacts and to identify directions for innovative practices in the future, the unique contributions of this work. A questionnaire designed on the Luftman’s maturity model as well as various other statistical methods, including PLS path modeling, Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks test and Mann–Whitney U test, are applied to understand how the EA can deliver benefits. The implications of our findings in this study as well as its limitations are discussed from different viewpoints to enable both academics and practitioners to detect the flaws in the existing EA frameworks and propose improvements

CEO career horizons and when to go public: the relationship between risk-taking, speed and CEO power

Initial public offerings make a noteworthy contribution to both the growth of equity markets and the promotion of entrepreneurial activities. As a strategic issue, the decision on when to go public depends on the firm’s leader, and the personal characteristics of chief executives (CEOs) have been found to affect the results of the initial public offering. This paper investigates whether the speed with which firms go public depends on the CEO’s time to retirement, the so-called career horizon. Hypothesising that CEOs with short career horizons will be more risk-averse and aim to preserve their legacy, we found that CEO career horizon is negatively related to the time the firm takes to start the initial public offering. CEOs with longer career horizons make faster, more risky decisions, such as to go public, because of their risk-taking preferences. We also examined how the extent of CEO power affects this relationship. Our results show that a low level of power is linked to more risky decisions, so that powerful CEOs tend to be associated with taking longer to reach the point of initial public offering