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A poor relationship between top management and IT personnel is often denoted as a business–IT gap. In an era of digital transformation, bridging this gap and establishing a strong relationship between business and IT are more important than ever before. The purpose of this paper is thus to examine a particular link between business and IT managers – a partnership relationship – together with the factors facilitating it.

A partnership construct is developed based on interdisciplinary studies and transferred to the business–IT context since it is not generally used in IT disciplines. The model was empirically tested with structural equation modelling using data obtained from 221 IT managers in Slovenian companies.

The results show that both the perceived value of IT and the business orientation of the IT department exert a positive influence on the partnership, while a mere technology-oriented IT department has a negative effect on the partnership relationship. Furthermore, the paper also presents the prerequisites for a business-oriented IT department.

In this digitalisation era, IT is becoming even more important for its strategic role in organisations. There is thus a strong need to bridge the business–IT gap. Despite significant efforts made to close this gap, it remains a major issue. This research contributes to understanding the business–IT gap and presents the key factors for ensuring a partnership relationship is in place. The study also combines the views of social exchange theory and knowledge-based theory and upgrades findings concerning the influence of social facilitators on collaboration outcomes.

This chapter aims to explore how social innovation can be achieved through providing employees with information to enhance participation in decision-making.

The chapter takes a largely theoretical and discursive approach. Building on key theories on the links between information and decision-making, it explores the logic behind the potential for empowerment through providing information. Empirical examples are used to demonstrate some elements of the theoretical propositions.

The chapter demonstrates that there is a strong theoretical potential for enhancing employee participation through the provision of more and better information. It also suggests that organisations would benefit economically from this, because of a broader knowledge-base underlying business decisions. However, in many organisations the potential is either not recognised, or, for organisational design and cultural reasons, it is considered undesirable to increase employee participation.

Organisations and employees need to increase their efforts in understanding how they can use IT to provide decision-makers, and in particular employees, with better information.

There is huge potential for social innovation through IS and IT that is currently under-exploited. Because people are exposed to IT in their daily lives so much, they are more likely to want to push for better use of IT and access to information in their organisations.

This chapter provides an unusual angle on social innovation. Drawing on some key theoretical frameworks from the IS domain, it demonstrates a strong link between enhancing information provision and increasing employee participation.

The gap between top management and IS personnel is preventing organisations develop a competitive advantage based on IS. The purpose of this paper is thus to improve the understanding of the relationship between top management and IS personnel and to identify the key factors that are important in this relationship.

Two separate questionnaires were used for IS department managers and top management to identify key factors in the relationship. In total, 221 CIOs and 93 CEOs agreed to participate in the research. To identify factors in the business-IS relationship an exploratory factor analysis was used. Further, factor scores were calculated and the independent samples t-test was used to compare these factor scores to reveal any significant differences in perceptions between CIOs and CEOs.

The empirical investigation reveals the existence of nine factors that are important in the business-IS relationship. Seven factors are perceived differently by top management and IS management and thus causing the gap in the relationship, while two factors are similarly perceived.

The paper presents the key areas business and IS personnel should pay attention to. Therefore, it enables reducing the business-IS gap by considering the identified factors and dedicating significant effort to the factors with significant differences.

The paper contributes to understanding the key factors in the relationship between top and IS managers as it identifies factors that are causing the business-IS gap. Thus, it develops the existing literature since it is simultaneously focusing on managerial and IS side. The study is also valuable for researchers enabling future research in exploring these factors in detail.

The purpose of this study is to examine how two organizational members, i.e. business and information technology (IT) managers evaluate the success measures of acquired enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

Surveys were conducted in two Northern European countries – Finland and Estonia.

Prior studies suggest that business and IT managers evaluate organizational‐IT issues, including ERP success evaluations differently. However, this study's data analysis showed that no significant statistical differences exist between the two groups on the six dimensions of ERP success operationalized with the exception of one, i.e. vendor/consultant quality. In brief, both groups seem to have a similar view of ERP success in their respective organizations.

Discusses the implications for practitioners and researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to present organizational competencies for gaining information technology (IT) benefits within organizations. Following the analysis of 16 in‐depth case studies, a set of six high level, fundamental competencies and 17 facilitating competencies are identified. A framework for orchestrating the organizational competencies is also presented. The results of this research would be useful to academics in developing measures for assessing the level of organizational competence and for practitioners in identifying and nurturing competencies for organizational benefits realization.

The methodology involved two phases. Phase 1 entailed conducting 16 extensive case studies. Case study methodology employed follows guidelines provided by Yin and Benbasat et al. Case studies are a suitable means to collect the data since the notion of competencies in delivering IT benefits has not been well understood in the literature. By analyzing and understanding the particular situation and factors in each organization in an in‐depth manner, the paper develops a sound interpretation of the abilities that organizations need to have in place to deliver IT benefits.

In order to gain business benefits from IT investments, organizations must develop competencies to exploit IT. These competencies involve individual skills and organizational processes that enable those skills to be effectively applied. This paper identifies 23 competencies categorized into fundamental and facilitating competencies that firms need to have in place if IT services are to be delivered adequately and business benefits achieved. Also developed is a network of competences based on the data collected in the 16 cases studied.

Like any research, this paper has its limitations. Given the qualitative and interpretive nature of the research, a lot of assertions are interpretations of the authors. While in the literature, this has been argued as a valid way to undertake research, clearly there are biases that creep into the research.

The model of competencies presented forms a good basis for enterprises to fine‐tune their abilities for harnessing IT.

While management researchers have been researching the notion of organizational competence for a while, it has not been well considered in the information systems arena; it is felt that this research makes a positive contribution to that effect.

The paper presents an approach for defining ICT investment proposals. The approach was developed on the authority of the Dutch Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management. The Ministry was confronted with a growing amount of ICT investment proposals. Since there was no format for describing a proposal and no procedure for obtaining the data on the basis of which a proposal was described, the decision to select proposals for funding missed any kind of rationality. Proposals differed enormously and hence were incomparable. The evaluation of existing ICT assessment methods showed that there was not any method that would meet the expectations and demands of the Ministry. The main points of criticism concentrated on the limitation of applying a fixed set of data for describing a project proposal and the absence of a process to support the selection of a meaningful set of data to describe a project. Inspired by the multi‐criteria score method of Parker a tailor‐made approach for defining ICT investment proposals was developed, taking into account the characteristics of the governmental organization. In this paper, the approach as well as the developmental process with regard to this approach are presented. The overall conclusion is that a tailor‐made approach, which is developed with the full cooperation of the user organization, has considerable advantages since local knowledge and expertise is incorporated in this type of approach.

The purpose of this paper is to address the call for more public sector empirical studies on benefits realisation (BR), to contribute to the literature on BR as a dynamic capability (DC) within the context of IT-enabled innovation in a public sector context and to highlight the challenges facing organisations if they adopt a BR competence and capability framework.

The empirical research conducted within this paper is an exploratory survey. Exploratory surveys are particularly useful when investigating a little known phenomenon and can help to uncover or provide preliminary evidence of association among concepts. This survey was a census of all National Health Service acute hospital trusts in England.

The study indicates that most hospitals that participated in the survey have a basic approach to BR and have yet to develop a more mature approach that would provide the strong micro-foundations of a BR capability.

The BR framework that has been the basis of the survey is interesting in terms of its components but is limited with regards to the micro-foundations of a benefits realisation capability within an organisation. The research suggests that organisations in the public sector need to focus much more on staff development and recruitment in the area of BR to ensure that they have the appropriate skills sets for a rapidly changing environment.

The paper proposes a framework for BR capabilities and IT-enabled change, and suggests that although the concept of maturity is valuable when considering the micro-foundations of BR, DCs change and respond to stimuli within the external and internal environment and must be renewed and refreshed regularly.

The primary purpose of this study is to examine the effect that information system capability had on e‐business information technology (IT) implementation strategy; and to understand how the quality of the implementation process for IT strategy could affect e‐business performance.

This study performed a survey of chief information officers from 1,000 major firms in Taiwan. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to test for the validity of research hypotheses.

Results showed that the capability of information systems could have a direct and significant effect on the quality of IT strategy implementation, and how the quality of this process could affect e‐business performance.

Every organization hopes to improve corporate competitiveness and transform its enterprise through the effective implementation of IT strategy. This study examined how information systems capability could affect the implementation of enterprise IT strategy. However, since large firms in Taiwan are the primary research subjects of this study, the conclusions may not be applicable to enterprises in different countries or cultures. Future studies could examine the subject from the three aspects of technology, organization, and environment to understand the effect that each of these aspects has on e‐business information systems capability.

With the rapid development of information technology, the introduction of innovative strategy dealing with IT has become an important topic of research, and has become a focus in the era of e‐business. As a result, organizations feel it is important to discover the shortcomings in information system capability factors that must be improved from the individual, group, or organization levels, and develop appropriate implementation frameworks for IT strategy based on this foundation.

This study uses empirical analysis to examine the effect that the capability of information systems has on the quality of implementation of IT strategy. A compilation of relevant literature showed that most studies have focused on conceptual frameworks or have examined the question of IT strategy from the level of technology. Few studies have examined the effect that information system capability has on IT implementation strategy. Therefore, the results and findings of this study could provide an important reference for IT strategy implementation, in the era of e‐business.

Information security is becoming increasingly more important as organisations are endangered by a variety of threats from both its internal and external environments. Many theorists now advocate that effective security policies should be created at senior management level. This is because executives are able to evaluate the organisation using a holistic approach as well as having the power to ensure that new systems and procedures are implemented in a timely manner. There is, however, a continuing lack of understanding regarding the strategic importance of managing information security. In addition, there is a gap in the literature on the relationship between directors and information security strategy. This paper attempts to close this gap by exploring how directors perceive their organisation's security and what factors influence their decisions on the development and implementation of information security strategy.

The research is based on constructivist grounded theory. Forty‐three interviews were conducted at executive level in 29 organisations. These interviews were then coded and analysed in order to develop new theory on directors' perception of risk and its effect on the development and implementation of information security strategy.

The analysis shows that senior managers' engagement with information security is dependent on two key variables: the strategic importance of information systems to their organisation and their perception of risk. Additionally, this research found that these two variables are affected by both organisational contextual factors and the strategic and operational actions undertaken within the business. Furthermore, the results demonstrated that the two board variables also have an impact on the organisation's environment as well as its strategic and operational actions. This paper uses the data gathered from the interviews to develop a model of these factors. In addition, a perception grid is constructed which illustrates the potential concerns that can drive board engagement.

The paper illustrates the advantages of using the perception grid to understand and develop current and future information security issues.

The paper investigates how organisational directors perceive information security and how this perception influences the development of their information security strategy.