The role of stakeholder understanding in aligning IT with business objectives

This article reports a study of senior management experience and their opinions on the issues of effective stakeholder communication and the evolving understanding between business and IT. In particular, we explore the impact of modern business context and practices, the issues of trust, nomenclature and the main barriers to the mutual stakeholder understanding. We find that a lack of communication and a lack of understanding between stakeholders impacts negatively on good alignment as manifested by scope creep, the desire to outsource and a lack of trus

The impact of communications and understanding on the success of business/IT alignment

This article reports on an investigation of IS stakeholders communication and mutual understanding, and their impact on the success of business / IT alignment. In particular, by following a hermeneutic study of transcripts of two focus groups and several interviews conducted with senior business and IT executives, the paper explores the issues of modern business context and practices, project scope and structure, trust, language and nomenclature, and the barriers to the effective stakeholder communication and&nbsp; understanding. The study results are finally compared against the standard model of business and IT alignment. The main unexpected finding being executives\u27 pre-occupation with issues of &quot;marginal&quot; value to the alignment model, such as day-to-day management of communicative and understanding effectiveness, as opposed to the fundamental issues of strategy and infrastructure fit.<br /

A Success Story in Teaching Real World ICT to IS Students: A Case Study in using Portable Storage Devices

Teaching Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to Information Systems (IS) students has too often drawn its pedagogy from Computer Science Education. This paper illustrates by way of a case study a set of very successful techniques and a philosophy of, perhaps, an IS pedagogy. We show that it is possible to expose IS students to some quite rigorous educational experiences that are particularly well suited in preparing them for their future employment and their careers as IS professionals. This paper discusses the use of portable and removable hard disks as “virtual computers” and “virtual servers”, as an aide in the pursuit of providing practice of the ICT theory

A Brief History of the Pick Environment in Australia

Abstract. Mainstream Information Technology professionals have misunderstood the Pick environment for many years. The Pick environment has been conceived, designed and built with business solutions as its key driver. At its heyday there were over 3,000 business applications available across a very wide range of hardware platforms supporting from 1 to thousands of real time users. The tentative economic recovery of the 90&apos;s and the Y2K fears created cautious and conservative corporate decision-making. During those tumultuous years there were startling leaps in information and communications technology rewarding those who invested in the future and in themselves. The Pick community at the time were fragmented and somewhat narrow-minded in their view of the future and were unable to collectively invest in developing new technologies. Corporate executive peer group pressure to adopt &quot;vanilla&quot; relational technologies and the desire for homogeneity is creating even more pressure on the Pick community

Hermeneutic phenomenological investigation of business and IT alignment

The maximum potential potential alignment between business and IT is constrained by the mutually interacting factors of communications, shared understanding, trust, use of an appropriately scaled project and risk management methodology, distributed business ownership of all its processes and a pervasive IT ownership of every technology-enables business process

Information Systems Degrees in Australia: The Genesis

International audienceThis paper traces the birth of the Information Systems degrees offered by RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. The paper argues that university curriculum in new areas is a reflection of forces both social and individual. The case of Information Systems curriculum is distinctly different from Computer Science both in the extent of these influences and in the nature of the relationships between the University and industry in general. The analysis presented here is a social history. It does not concentrate on pivotal moments of invention so much as the people and influences that culminated in programs that persist until today