Search results

This study seeks to examine the impact of owner's knowledge of information technology (IT) on business and IT strategic alignment, as well as on IT use in the small firm context, using the resource‐based view as a theoretical foundation.

A random sample of 217 small manufacturers and financial services firms in the USA answered a two‐page survey containing questions pertaining to the company's business strategies, the extent IT supported each business strategy, types of IT used, and the level of owner's IT knowledge.

Owner's knowledge of IT was found to be a significant predictor of IT strategic alignment, as well as adoption of traditional IT and internet technologies, while controlling for differences in firm attributes (size, age, industry affiliation, and strategic focus).

Small firm owners are well advised to seek ways of improving their knowledge of IT, integrating IT use in firm‐level business planning, as well as reexamining their business strategy and IT use to detect and correct misalignments, if any.

From the resource‐based view, the owner's IT knowledge is a critical resource that cannot be easily codified, hence less susceptible to competitive erosion, since it is embedded in the owner's tacit knowledge and expressed in the unique but complementary use of IT in support of the firm's strategic goals. This study confirmed small firm owner's knowledge of IT as an important, knowledge‐based capability and a vital component of business‐IT strategic alignment.

Technology‐related issues have an increasing impact on business. The alignment between overall business objectives and technology‐related decisions, such as decisions on application service acquisitions, resurfaces occasionally in the intense academic discussion on information systems (IS). Prior research indicates that the alignment of business and IS decisions remains a major concern for business practitioners. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the factors that drive the consistency in technology‐related decisions and result in diverse modes of business‐IS alignment.

This study investigates application service acquisitions among the top 200 firms in Finland. In this quantitative empirical study, principal component analysis with varimax rotation method is used to examine the companies' drivers for business‐IS alignment. Moreover, the firms are categorized using the cluster analysis method.

This study identifies four factors that drive the achievement of business‐IS alignment. These factors are: awareness of the impact and risks of IS decisions, efficacy of IS management, systematic decision making process, and business development orientation of IS management. Moreover, the study identifies four clusters of firms that illustrate diverse modes of business‐IS alignment: ad‐hoc alignment, business‐driven alignment, consensual alignment, and technology‐driven alignment.

The value of the study lies in revealing the key factors influencing the alignment of vital IS investments and the overall business strategy. The study identifies four clearly different approaches to business‐IS alignment. Moreover, the paper suggests that business‐IS alignment stems from several factors, including the collective development of strategies that reflect the combined knowledge of business and IS managers.

Despite the conceptual, empirical and theoretical advances in alignment–performance relationship, there is a limited research on the alignment dimensions and organizational performance measures. Though strategic alignment is believed to improve organizational performance, the purpose of this paper is to develop conjectures for understanding how different alignment dimensions influence organizational performance measures.

The data were acquired from 161 senior IT and business managers paired responses in China and were analyzed by using a structural equation modeling technique.

The hypothesized relationships are largely supported. Thus, quality-oriented strategic alignment dimension has a significant relationship with all performance measures. Contrary to expectations, both product and marketing-oriented strategic alignment dimensions do not show a significant impact on financial return. The marketing-oriented strategic alignment dimension also has an insignificant relationship with operational excellence.

This study suggests that the business–IT alignment can be dimensioned to better combine business strategy and IT strategy. Hence, managers can focus specific alignment dimension instead of entire strategies of a firm for a better decision making.

Findings suggest guidance for formulating combined business and IT strategic alignment into dimensions and proposing insightful and practical implications.

This study intends to reveal how to manage the dynamic process of information technology business (IT-business) strategic alignment; managing this alignment is an unknown yet critical issue that must be addressed by any firm trying to unleash the business value of their IT investments.

This study presents our case study of a healthcare organization after healthcare information systems (HIS) implementation and investigates the strategic alignment between the implemented HIS and the organizational strategy from a dynamic perspective.

Two different patterns of alignment (i.e. an IT-strategy–driven pattern and a business-strategy–driven pattern) are identified, and a process model of the IT-business strategic alignment is developed. Moreover, this study focuses on the social dimension of strategic alignment and examines the role of this dimension, which is critical and fundamental with respect to other dimensions, in achieving strategic alignment.

This paper makes important theoretical contributions to the understanding of strategic alignment by taking a dynamic view of alignment, identifying different patterns of alignment, emphasizing the role of social alignment and developing a comprehensive process model.

From a managerial perspective, managers should periodically scrutinize the IT-business alignment patterns of their organizations and develop dynamic capabilities for strategic alignment.

While most of the literature on the dynamics of strategic alignment have focused on confirming the dynamics of strategic alignment and identifying the factors that create dynamics in alignment, this study examines IT-business alignment as a continuous process over time, thus providing a novel perspective. Moreover, while the role of social alignment and its impact on downstream performance remain unclear in the current literature, this study incorporates the social dimension of alignment to investigate the role of this dimension in achieving IT-business strategic alignment.

Information technology often provides a manufacturing‐based competitive advantage. Information technology can assist manufacturing firms in developing their strategic roles. Discusses a continuum of four strategic roles of the contribution of information technology in manufacturing firms. Any enhancement of manufacturing firm’s competitive position tends to take place through systematic movement from one stage to an adjacent one, with the ultimate objective of becoming a world‐class manufacturer. Draws on a strategic alignment model of manufacturing management and information technology, which is defined in terms of four domains of strategic choice, i.e. the structure and infrastructure of manufacturing strategy, and the structure and infrastructure of information technology ‐ each with its own constituent dimensions. Conceptualizes the model in terms of two fundamental characteristics of strategic management: strategic fit (the interrelationships between structural and infrastructural domains) and functional integration (integration between manufacturing and information technology functional domains). Implementation of information technology is through cross‐domain alignment via strategic fit and functional integration. Examines the implementation of MRP (material requirement planning) and JIT (just‐in‐time) in relation to this strategic alignment model.

Because technology innovation has changed the way people do business significantly, adopting information technology (IT) for strategic planning has become a vital issue for today's business management. However, most studies seemed to focus more on technology than on information in IT. Unfortunately, the way technology alters the business model is not as much as the way information changes an organization's managerial concept. The impact is beyond marketing issues and is very important to an organization's managerial philosophy. This study adopts a strategy concept called the co-alignment principle (Olsen, West, & Tse, 1998), to investigate how an information system (IS) could be designed to enhance and process the information flows involved in the processes of strategy formulation and implementation. It places IT implementation issues directly at the heart of strategic management for research. Using qualitative research approach with a single case-study method employed, 11 recommendations and 10 propositions were obtained to address and handle the newly discovered 7 key issues for strategy formulation and implementation. The study also exemplified that when these issues are being handled by an IS properly designed, a coordination strategic IT framework that goes beyond the thinking of cost saving and productivity increase is achieved as well.

This study aims to explore the relationship between IT and HRM in the context of manufacturing SMEs, more specifically the relationship between strategic HRM and e-HRM as well as the performance effects of this relationship. The conceptual framework is founded upon the resource-based view (RBV), specifically upon the strategic HRM and e-HRM capabilities of SMEs and upon the strategic alignment of these capabilities in the form of capability configurations or “gestalts.”

To answer the research questions, a questionnaire was constructed and mailed to 1854 manufacturing SMEs in the province of Quebec, Canada, producing 216 valid responses that were used for statistical analysis purposes. Capability configurations were identified through a cluster analysis of the e-HRM and strategic HRM capabilities developed by these firms.

Using structural equation modeling to validate the research model, a causal analysis confirmed a positive influence of the sampled SMEs’ strategic orientation upon their development of strategic HRM capabilities. More importantly, a higher level of alignment between the SMEs’ strategic HRM and e-HRM capabilities was associated to a higher level of strategic HRM performance.

To our knowledge, ours is the first study to show interest in the effect of the strategic alignment of HRM and IT capabilities upon HRM performance, by adopting a configurational perspective and considering organizational IT from a functional point of view. Given the specific context of SMEs, the focus was on e-HRM capabilities related to the IT infrastructure of these organizations and the IT competencies of individuals related to HRM.

This paper aims to investigate the alignment between the information‐processing needs and capabilities during interorganizational relationships through the lenses of both the product and the business relationships life cycle concepts, and the types of information exchanged.

This paper follows up on a previous empirical study conducted in the automotive sector, investigating the electronic collaboration within the supply chain of a large European Automotive Supplier (EAS). Out of the 61 respondents from this previous study, four illustrative cases are selected to further investigate their information alignment, where each case involves one specific relationship between EAS and its business partners based on the supply chain collaboration classification provided by the German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA).

The conclusion is that the phenomenon is bimodal and requires that the different information‐processing needs and capabilities associated with each stage of both the product and the business relationships life cycles should be considered.

The small number of illustrative cases and the specificity of the chosen sector limit the generalizability of the results. Without considering the various types of information‐processing needs and capabilities as well as the stage of both product and business relationships life cycles, a biased conclusion could lead to inappropriate information and communication technology investments and business decisions.

The richness of the cases and the genuine integration of the life cycle concepts and the type of information with the notion of alignment help to identify some key aspects of interorganizational relationships.

This study aims to test a model in which the effect of strategic information technology (IT)-business alignment capability (hereafter referred to as “strategic alignment”) on organizational performance is examined via the mediating role of organizational agility [studied as operational adjustment agility (OAA) and market capitalizing agility (MCA)] along with the moderating influence of environmental uncertainty.

The research uses survey data accumulated from 220 managers (IT and bank managers) working in the regional rural banks of Odisha, India. A structural equation modelling approach is used to investigate the strategic alignment-performance relationship.

The findings demonstrate the positive effect of strategic alignment on agility (studied as OAA and MCA). This paper finds the positive effects of strategic alignment and both OAA and MCA on organizational performance. The moderation analysis reveals that in an uncertain environment, strategic alignment has more impact on MCA than OAA. However, the test of mediation exhibits OAA as a more significant mediator promoting the strategic alignment-performance linkage, than MCA. This was further validated from the moderated-mediation analysis.

Although previous research studies (mostly conducted in the context of developed countries) have reported about the positive strategic alignment-agility-performance linkages, yet the literature is silent regarding the influence of external contingent factors on these relationships from a rural banking perspective in a developing country setting (such as India). The research extends the strategic alignment-agility-performance theories and provides empirical support for these unique associations in the context of rural banking in India and thereby, greatly contributes to the existing strategic alignment literature.

Drawing on established alignment and architectural theory, this paper seeks to present the argument that an organisation's enterprise architecture can enable the alignment of business strategy and information systems and technology (IS/IT).

The paper presents a detailed case study of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), where a high degree of alignment and international recognition of excellence in business and enabling IS/IT performance are documented.

The ABS enterprise architecture was developed in 1999‐2001 and describes the organisation's physical business and IS/IT elements, and the connective relationships that inform the alignment condition. The ABS architecture is robustly holistic in form, and is characterised by a strong and equal focus on business operations, the deliberate inclusion of an IS/IT governance framework, the structuring and hosting of corporate information for business delivery, and the efficient reuse of IS/IT components.

The ABS case study also examined empirically the social aspects and formal mechanisms of organisational alignment, and shows how a formal enterprise architecture mechanism can integrate into a successful alignment process.