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

Defining the Content of Information Strategy: Linking Theory and Practice

Für viele Unternehmen ist Informationsverarbeitung (IV) nicht mehr nur ein Kostenfaktor, sondern von strategischer Bedeutung. Dementsprechend findet sich die strategische IV-Planung seit geraumer Zeit auf den vordersten Plätzen der Managementagenda. Bisher lag der Fokus der Forschungsarbeiten allerdings auf dem Planungsprozess und nicht auf den Inhalten des Planungsergebnisses, der Informationsstrategie. In dieser Arbeit wird untersucht welche IV-bezogenen Entscheidungen von strategischer Relevanz für Unternehmen sind. Dabei werden die Argumente der Praktiker mit theoretischen Ansätzen kombiniert um zu einem begründeten und praktisch relevanten Vorschlag für die Inhalte von Informationsstrategien zu kommen

Information strategy-towards a comprehensive model of information strategy

Strategic information planning is an important topic in practice as well as in research. So far, work has mainly focused on the process of Strategic Information Planning (SIP) rather than on its result - the information strategy. But as long as the output of the planning process has not been well defined, all discussions on the process itself necessarily remain vague, too. Hence, research has been challenged with elaborating the concept of information strategy more precisely and in more detail. This paper discusses a comprehensive and comprehensible model of information strategy. The paper starts by analysing different views on information strategy from academic literature, the most advanced of which is perhaps the conceptualisation of information strategy as a system of plans. However, most interpretations found in the literature are implicit while the few explicit conceptualisations are not satisfactorily argued in terms of completeness, structure and rationale. The model proposed in this paper takes into account the interpretations of information strategy prevailing in the academic literature. It is based on a closer investigation of the domain of information strategies and distinguishes different subject matter of information processing. Our model helps to clarify and integrate the ongoing discussions devoted to information strategy as a functional and enterprise-wide strategy, as well as to strategic alignment and to the role of the CIO. It allows for an integration of traditionally separated interpretations on information strategy

The IT Strategy Divide: Professional Practice and Academic Debate

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How Big Old Companies Navigate Digital Transformation

New digital technologies present both game-changing opportunities for - and existential threats to - companies whose success was built in the pre-digital economy. This article describes our findings from a study of 25 companies that were embarking on digital transformation journeys. We identified two digital strategies - customer engagement and digitized solutions - that provide direction for a digital transformation. Two technology-enabled assets are essential for executing those strategies: an operational backbone and a digital services platform. We describe how a big old company can combine these elements to navigate its digital transformation.Click here for podcast summary (mp3) Click here for free 2-page executive summary (pdf)Click here for free presentation slides (pdf

IOS 2.0 : new aspects on inter-organizational integration through enterprise 2.0 technologies

This special theme of „Electronic Markets“ focuses on research concerned with the use of social technologies and "2.0" principles in the interaction between organization (i.e., with "inter-organizational systems (IOS) 2.0"). This theme falls within the larger space of Enterprise 2.0 research, but focuses in particular on inter-organizational use (between enterprises), not intra-organizational use (in a single enterprise). While there is great interest in practice regarding the use of 2.0 technologies to support intra-organizational communication, collaboration and interaction, information systems (IS) research has largely been oblivious to this important use of social technologies