Business Strategy, Information Systems Strategy, And Strategic Fit: Measurement And Performance Impacts

Although there has been much discussion of the strategic role of information systems, there have been few attempts to capture or quantify the extent to which information systems complement company strategy and impact performance. This dissertation research develops, validates, and applies measurement instruments and accompanying procedures to assess information systems (IS) strategy and IS strategic fit (the synergy between business strategy and IS strategy).;The research is based on Venkatraman\u27s work. He developed and tested an approach for measuring realized business unit strategy. This dissertation extends his work, applying it to the assessment of IS strategy and IS strategic fit.;The research was carried out in two main phases: (I) Instrument development and pilot testing, and (II) Survey-based instrument refinement and validation. Initially, twelve hundred North American financial services and manufacturing firms were selected for study using Dun & Bradstreet directories. Of these, nine hundred were sent questionnaire packages. Using the data gathered and multivariate analytical techniques (primarily Partial Least Squares analysis), the instruments developed were shown to be reliable and valid. The relationships between realized business strategy, realized IS strategy, IS strategic fit, IS effectiveness, and business performance, although not strong, were found to be statistically significant.;Potential implications of the research for practising managers include the creation of simple tools to improve IS planning, evaluation, and effectiveness. Implications for researchers include the operationalization of the IS strategy construct; the operationalization of the IS strategic fit construct; the operationalization of the IS effectiveness construct in a strategy-related context; an examination of the links between realized business strategy, realized IS strategy, IS strategic fit, IS effectiveness, and business performance; and a contribution toward the cumulative research tradition in the strategy and IS area

Using IT to Unleash the Power of Strategic Improvisation

To lead their company toward success in today’s ever-changing landscape, managers need to know how to rapidly and creatively use their organization’s capabilities to seize opportunities before others do. We term this leadership team capability strategic improvisation. Strategic improvisation, as an alternative to traditional planning for urgent situations, builds on clear and real-time information and communication. After surveying multiple executive respondents in 100 organizations, we found that information technology (IT) capabilities, especially information management capability and IT infrastructure flexibility, facilitate strategic improvisation. These capabilities play different roles depending on the type of IT strategy the organization follows. Other factors, including the organization’s competitive environment and design, affect the development and impact of strategic improvisation. In a rapidly changing business environment, an organization is best served by strategic improvisation when it has an innovative IT strategy, a flexible IT infrastructure, a loose organizational structure and an experimental culture

Patterns of Capability Building in New Ventures: The Role of Digital Technology Affordances

Technology affordances of social media, mobile technologies, analytics, and cloud computing are used by entrepreneurs to create new ventures and to innovate. New ventures are vulnerable in the early stages of their lifecycles, and so often try to connect to entrepreneurial ecosystems with an ensemble of actors, to gain access to shared pools of resources such as those available in university incubators. This paper examines the use of digital technology affordances to develop important new venture capabilities. We use a case study method and a configurational approach (i.e., fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis) to identify how combinations of technological, organizational, and contextual factors interact in the ideation and development stages of new ventures as they develop various capabilities. In this way, we examine technology-enabled patterns of capability building

Digital Ecodynamics in Small Firms: Using Information Technology to Compete

In this article, we describe the co-evolution and fusing of business and digital technology strategies, investments in technology, the digitization of business processes, and related impacts in small firms we have studied. These firms relied heavily on digital technologies, with several focusing on maximizing cost efficiencies and developing the ability to scale rapidly and effectively using cloud-based platforms. The firms relied on early adoption of digital technology, and technical agility, to create business opportunities and competitive advantages. We used what we learned in our study to create a framework to inform research and practice. We invite practitioners to use this framework to think through business decisions when launching or repositioning small digital technology-enabled firms. Our study provides new insights into technology-enabled innovation and digital business strategy as well as firm capabilities required to compete in an increasingly digital and global business environment

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

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

Digital Innovation: A Frugal Ecosystem Perspective

In this conceptual paper, we attempt to answer the question: How do firms develop frugal IT capabilities in a resource-constrained ecosystem? Frugal firms tend to successfully overcome severe infrastructure, financial, social, and technological constraints. Frugal IT Innovation” is a special case of frugal innovation where IT/IS play a pivotal, core role in enabling capabilities to overcome challenges of resource-constrained business environments. It is centered on development of products/services with a sharp focus on affordability, simplicity, and sustainability. Taking a digital ecodynamics perspective, we focus on the co-evolution of firm-level capabilities, the frugal ecosystem, and underlying IT systems to uncover how a dynamic, higher-order, frugal IT innovation capability (FITIC) drives firm performance. Due to unique ecosystem conditions, we measure firm performance by including social and environmental measures in addition to financial measures. The paper discusses ecosystem-wide implications and contributes to advancement of both theoretical and practice-based knowledge in this domain

Implementing Disruptive Technologies: What Have We Learned?

Rich research opportunities lie ahead for scholars interested in building a theory to explain why and how some organizations succeed while others fail in implementing disruptive technologies. As a complex socio-technical process, implementing disruptive technologies represents an endeavor fraught with challenges. Leaders need tools to assess whether implementing a potentially disruptive technology will succeed or fail; planners need a road map to navigate the implementation’s potential stepping-stones and stumbling blocks. Disruptive technology implementation scholarship is rich, has eclectic roots and conflicting findings, but lacks a success theory. To advance such a theory and guide scholars and practitioners, we conducted a structured and systematic literature review, and examined 139 empirical articles published between 1983 and 2020 in leading management and information systems journals. We focused our attention on answering two questions: How do incumbent organizations implement disruptive technologies successfully? How does the implementation of disruptive digital technologies differ from the implementation of other disruptive technologies? We employed a mixed-method approach using three criteria: technological category, challenges to successful implementation, and degree of implementation success. We identified strategic and technical implementation challenges, developed a technology implementation framework, and advanced propositions that together provide a current disruptive technology implementation success theory pending further testing