Journal of Strategic Information Systems最新文献

Successfully introducing new technologies to employees remains a critical and challenging task for managers. Practitioner and academic research points to the crucial role of formal communication in the success of technology implementation. We developed a scale for measuring formal communication quality and assessed its influence using three samples of working professionals who were anticipating new technologies at work. Informed by the coping model of user adaptation, we examined the direct and indirect effects of formal communication quality during the anticipation stage of a technology implementation project on employees’ cognitions, emotions and intention to connect with colleagues in order to prepare themselves for the new technologies. The results validate our conceptualization of formal communication as a second-order formative construct with information quality in four content areas (i.e., what, how, why and when) as the first-order dimensions. Our findings affirm the role of formal communication as a managerial influence mechanism that positively affects an employee’s preliminary evaluation of a new IT during the anticipation stage. The evaluation of the new IT triggered emotions, and the emotions in turn motivated employees to seek opinions and camaraderie from others as a means of adapting to the new IT. Our post hoc analyses illustrate the dynamic nature of the relationship among formal communication quality, beliefs, emotions and coping intentions as the implementation unfolds. Our work contributes to the literature by improving the operationalization of formal communication quality, expanding the current understanding of seeking social support and revealing new insight about the temporal dynamics of the relationships in the nomological network during the anticipation stage. The validated scale of formal communication can be a useful tool for managers who wish to evaluate the effectiveness of their communication and to assess its impact on employees’ adaptation.

Digital strategy alignment is a dominant concern for today’s managers and information systems researchers. Yet research in this area remains fragmented, particularly on the digital strategy alignment of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which is concerning owing to their value to European economies. Employing dynamic capabilities as an analytical lens, we investigate how 43 British, Irish, Italian, and Spanish SMEs, across five industry sectors, enact digital aligning. We identify a model of digital alignment comprising five phases, which we term “passive acceptance,” “connection,” “immersion,” “fusion,” and “transformation,” as well as the specific combinations of sensing, seizing, and reorganizing capabilities associated with each phase. Our model provides a holistic, practice-based perspective and highlights the role of micro-behaviors and leadership in SMEs implementing digital strategy.

Digitalization presents companies with abundant opportunities, i.e., action possibilities leading to new products, services, and business models. Specifically, digital opportunities for incumbents require attention as their resource base can be both asset and liability, and the interplay between incumbents’ resources and digital opportunities is hardly understood. To conceptualize this interplay, we present a taxonomy of digital opportunities for incumbents and related stylized facts of opportunity conversion. As justificatory knowledge, we build on the resource-based view and organizational ambidexterity. Our work contributes to descriptive knowledge at the interface between digital innovation and transformation, providing new perspectives on incumbents’ digitally extended resources.

The strategic information systems planning (SISP) literature has retained a narrow focus on organizational level activity to date. Limited empirical research has explored SISP’s multi-level interlinkages and complexities. Studies that have attempted to explore the micro activity of strategizing via a practice-based perspective have had their significance to academic and practitioner audiences questioned on grounds of micro-isolationism. Using a strategy as practice (SAP) lens, this study investigates how senior managers practice SISP through case studies of two public sector organizations (PSOs). The research’s primary contribution is a multi-level framework representing the practice of SISP. We ‘de-isolate’ SISP activity by empirically revealing how it is linked across macro, meso, and micro levels by SISP’s practitioners. Relating seemingly mundane strategic activity to matters of consequence has proven an enduring issue. Yet, at a time when organizations are facing grand challenges of increasing frequency and scale, we argue that the situating of day-to-day information systems (IS) strategy work within its broader context has never been more important. We propose a future research agenda premised upon moving ‘upstream’ to position SISP relative to grand challenges and ‘downstream’ to capture more open and inclusive forms of SISP.

Current competitive environments necessitate that firms pursue electronic integration in parallel to agility. However, most research to date has examined integration and agility relatively independently and has overlooked the relationship between them. Using coordination theory, this paper suggests that integration enables the two capabilities of agility (i.e., sensing and responding). Results from a study of 303 business unit operations of manufacturing organizations show that integration within business units and with outside partners is positively associated with process coupling of the value chain, both internally and externally. Further, both types of integration are positively associated with knowledge flow within and outside the business unit. In turn, both lead to higher capability to sense change in the business environment and respond to it with agility. This research helps us understand the integration-agility relation better by investigating the role of the knowledge and process capabilities.

Corporate governance mechanisms in the Information Technology (IT) industry are viewed as pivotal for the success of IT organizations. While corporate governance, particularly in terms of board characteristics, has been extensively studied in other disciplines, it has not received as much attention in the Information Systems discipline. This study investigates the effects of board structure and its changes (i.e., board flux) on organizational performance. Results show that board size, gender diversity, and board age have curvilinear effects while board independence has a positive effect and board flux has a negative impact on performance. However, the negative relationship between board flux and performance was weaker for firms with a higher, as compared with those with fewer, number of independent directors. In addition to making a useful contribution to the sparse literature on the role of corporate governance in IT organizations, our study has strong implications for research and practice.

Despite suggestions that analytics projects have value, the literature has, at times, glossed over the obstacles organizations must overcome to realize value from analytics. This research reports on a longitudinal case study of one organization's efforts to improve its profit margins by incorporating analytics into how it generates revenue. The case describes a business unit launching the organization's analytics initiatives, which they deliberately hid from their information technology department to reduce interference. Our study finds that realizing shadow analytics value involves a 3-phase sensemaking process that redefines organizational structures and sets organizations on the path towards digital transformation. These findings offer implications to the mechanisms and structures necessary for realizing value from analytics. Practically, analytics projects may require managers to rethink project management practices and business unit’s and IT department’s roles in analytics projects.

Temporary organizations (TOs) are organizational forms characterized by finite-life duration, novel tasks, heterogeneity of organizational members, and different phases of work. They have a greater proportion of emergent processes than more enduring organizations do. This poses particular challenges in the use of IT because it is difficult to foresee all IT applications that are required. This paper examines how IT is used to support the execution of processes in TOs. The empirical setting for our study is a particular and exemplar temporary organization: the 2016 Olympic Games Organizing Committee. Through immersive, in depth and qualitative fieldwork, based on participant observation, interviews, and internal documents, we find that TOs have a dynamic mix of operational processes in different phases of work. Accordingly, they have four patterns of IT use: (1) planned use - of formal IT, (2) planned use - of informal IT, (3) emergent use - of informal IT as a substitute for formal IT, and (4) emergent use - of informal IT combined with formal IT. We develop a theoretical explanation for how the patterns address the distinctive conditions facing TOs (i.e. a novel task done in a finite time, by multiple and heterogeneous people, across different phases of work) and its dynamic mix of processes through both planned and improvised use of IT. Practical implications include the impact of improvised IT use on aspects such as security, compliance, integration, and traceability.