Exploring the temporal aspect of B-IT social alignment on operational level: A reflexive thematic analysis

Abstract

The success of IS change implementation on the operational level is surrounded by challenges that mainly concern cross-departmental management and people issues involved in the implementation process. Different organizational departments are entrained to different temporal structures that shape the temporal context of business and IT (B-IT) communication. Through reflexive thematic analysis, and semi-structured interviews with 32 business and IT professionals from 7 banking and 2 telecom corporations in North Macedonia, we identify the key time dimensions and temporal events affecting B-IT communication. We propose a new construct, temporal B-IT social alignment, and we define it as B-IT-SU (shared understanding) of cross-departmental temporal structuring that enables and constrains the B-IT communication in the process of translating business demands into IT requirements on the operational level. Findings show that establishing strong structural linkage through interface actors mitigates only some of the challenges in IS implementation resulting from different temporal aspects. Furthermore, we found that the identified time dimensions as well as entrainment to different temporal structures and events have a significant impact on achieving B-IT-SU and B-IT-SA (shared agreement). We advance the view of B-IT social alignment, and we synthesize lessons that can be learned from this study that have practical implications.