Executives\u27 Perspectives on IT: Unraveling the Link between Business Strategy, Management Practices and IT Business Value

Executives’ perspectives on realized IT payoffs are clearly important in IT investment decisions. In this paper, we investigate the link between business strategy, management practices and IT business value. Our results indicate that corporations with more focused goals for IT achieve higher payoffs from IT throughout the value chain. We also find that management practices contribute to IT payoffs and that a corporation’s use of management practices relates to their strategic intent or goals for IT

A Process-oriented Assessmnt of the Alignment of Information Systems and Business Strategy: Implications for IT Business Value

It has been argued that organizations’ inability to realize sufficient value from their IT investment is due in part to an absence of strategic alignment. In an attempt to formally evaluate this notion, we introduce a conceptual model containing the determinants (management practices) and consequences (IT business value) of strategic alignment. Using this model, we develop a process-level perspective on strategic alignment centered around the processes in the value chain

The Development and Application of a Process-oriented Thermometer of IT Business Value

The issue of whether firms are receiving an adequate return on their investment in information technology (IT) continues to pervade managerial decision making. While productivity and other financial metrics are established hallmarks of IT investment evaluation, research has called for broader and richer metrics that can take into account the diversity of IT impacts. In this paper, we extend previous instrument development research to develop and test a process-oriented thermometer of IT business value using survey data based on executives\u27 perceptions of IT impacts at multiple points along the value chain. Consistent with earlier research, we find that our process measures are sensitive to differences in industry, firm size, and business strategy. Through additional analysis of post-implementation reviews of IT impacts in four firms, we find consistency of within-firm perceptual measures among teams of senior executives, highlighting the potential for our thermometer to gauge the level of IT impacts within a single firm. We conclude that process-oriented perceptual measures can offer new and useful insights into IT impacts, complementing what we already know from firm-level objective metrics

How Board of Directors’ Social Capital Enhances the Effectiveness of IT and R&D Resources Toward More Effective Innovation

A board of directors (BOD) plays a critical governance and strategic oversight role in an organization; acting as a fiduciary for shareholders, advising strategic decision making, and providing supportive resources and information to key decision makers. Especially critical is the role and contribution of corporate governance in guiding firm innovation. Such guidance has implications for investment in new products and services. In this paper, we examine the synergistic relationship between a firm’s BOD and technology and R&D inputs to innovation. We focus on the influence of the social capital of a BOD on different types of innovation. Our longitudinal findings show IT, R&D, and BOD social capital individually contribute to innovation performance, reflected in exploitative and exploratory innovation productivity. Moreover, BOD social capital enhances innovation enabled by IT activities. However, the combination of R&D activities and dimensions of BOD social capital leads to both negative and positive innovation performance

Digital Infrastructure, Business Unit Competitiveness, and Firm Performance Growth: The Moderating Effects of Business Unit IT Autonomy

This study examines the benefits that firms accrue from digital infrastructures that are effective in supporting corporate and business unit strategic objectives—which we term digital infrastructure effectiveness. We hypothesize that digital infrastructure effectiveness influences two types of performance outcomes—namely, business unit competitive performance and firm performance growth. We further hypothesize that these relationships are both moderated by the degree of business unit IT autonomy. Using data from an international survey of multi-business firms, we find that business unit IT autonomy exerts differential moderation effects on the relationships between digital infrastructure effectiveness and the two types of performance outcomes. As business unit IT autonomy increases, the effect of digital infrastructure effectiveness on business unit competitive performance gets stronger, while its effect on firm performance growth gets weaker. The primary contribution of this paper is explaining how and when digital infrastructures influence business unit performance and firm performance growth

Linking Information Technology and Dynamic Capabilities: The Elusive Dancing Partners?

A key question for information systems researchers and practitioners is how IT can build a competitive advantage in turbulent environments (Sambamurthy et al. 2003). The increase in environmental turbulence has made “dynamic IS strategy” all the more challenging; however, this critical topic still remains relatively under-researched (Wade and Hulland 2004). Most important, even if the link between IT and competitive advantage has been extensively examined, there is still a debate about the strategic role of IT (Carr 2003), which may intensify in turbulent environments

Corporate Knows Best (Maybe): The Impact of Global versus Local IT Capabilities on Business Unit Agility

The relationship between the corporate unit and its strategic business units (SBUs) has been variously described in the IS literature as either antagonistic or affable. At a time when corporate units are considering how to share platform-based capabilities (dubbed global IT) with SBUs, some SBUs may feel a loss of control while others see it as a chance to focus local IT on solving problems that are best handled by SBUs. Using data from an international survey of CIOs in the U.S., Germany, and Australia, we find that platform or global IT capabilities are associated with higher SBU agility notably when SBUs operate in a relatively stable environment. We also find that local IT influences SBU agility, particularly if SBUs have high levels of IT autonomy. Thus, the search for SBU agility may prompt corporate units to balance use of local and global IT resources and capabilities

Business Process and Information Technology Alignment: Construct Conceptualization, Empirical Illustration, and Directions for Future Research

Since strategic alignment first rose to prominence with Henderson and Venkatraman’s (1993) seminal paper, research has tended to focus on the extent of fit between IT and business strategy at the firm level. Although useful, a firm-level view of alignment could mask what firms are doing to realize intellectual alignment between business and IT strategy and whether their actions will likely succeed. In this study, we build on an emergent stream of research that considers alignment between IT and business strategy at the process level. Since research tends to view this form of alignment through the lens of IT support for business strategy, this perspective fails to account for how IT can enable the development of new business strategies. Accordingly, we conceptualize alignment between IT and business strategy at the process level using the lens of IT shortfall (a lack of IT support for business activities) and IT slack (having more IT than needed to support current business activities). Using data from matched surveys of IT and business executives at 317 U.S. and E.U. firms, we illustrate the value of this conceptualization and its process measures. Our results show that IT shortfall is negatively correlated with IT business value, while IT slack is positively correlated with IT business value. We further note that the existence of IT shortfall and IT slack depends on differences in firms’ chosen business strategy and whether a process is critical or non-critical to that strategy’s success

Information Technology and the Search for Organizational Agility: A Systematic Review with Future Research Possibilities

Organizations are increasingly turning to information technology (IT) to help them respond to unanticipated environmental threats and opportunities. In this paper, we introduce a systematic review of the literature on IT-enabled agility, helping to establish the boundary between what we know and what we don’t know. We base our review on a wide body of literature drawn from the AIS Basket of Eight IT journals, a cross-section of non-Basket journals, IT practitioner outlets, and premier international IS conferences. We review the use of different theoretical lenses used to investigate the relationship between IT and organizational agility and how the literature has conceptualized agility, its antecedents, and consequences. We also map the evolution of the literature through a series of stages that highlight how researchers have built on previous work. Lastly, we discuss opportunities for future research in an effort to close important gaps in our understanding