IT Initiatives Research Articles

Assessing Strategic Business and IT Alignment: Validation of a Novel Model across Moroccan Enterprises

Strategic alignment between Business and IT remains a critical factor for organizational effectiveness, but measuring it often presents a complex challenge. This paper evaluates the model we proposed in previous work to measure the degree of alignment between Business strategy and IT initiatives. We applied the model to a selection of Moroccan companies. We compared the alignment scores obtained with those from the established Strategic Alignment Maturity Model (SAMM) using Cohen’s Kappa and simple linear regression for comparative analysis. This study demonstrates our model’s effectiveness in evaluating continuous scores and provides substantial concordance in categorical maturity assessments. Our validation confirms that our model can apply to various business contexts, paving the way for further refinement to evaluate business-IT alignment strategies.

A realist evaluation of post-implementation modifications: a context-initiative-mechanism-outcome perspective

ABSTRACT This paper exemplifies a theoretical and methodological evaluation of IT Initiatives. It discusses post-implementation modifications (ERP-PIM) to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems for the purpose of business process optimization (BPO) from a Context-Initiative-Mechanism-Outcome (CIMO) perspective. CIMO suggests that context and mechanisms are factors triggering causal effects responsible for outcomes derived from technology initiatives. Through conceptualization, data collection/analysis, and retroduction, the paper proposes a middle-range theory to facilitate the explanation of outcomes from diverse post-implementation initiatives. Data from multiple case study identifies situational and action-formation mechanisms, and actions as essential to realizing the desired outcomes. The proposed ERP-PIM-CIMO theory encapsulates: (i) Business Process Optimization (BPO) as context, (ii) ERP-PIM as structure, (iii) Business Process Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Flexibility as observable events, (iv) ERP capability as causal mechanism, (v) actions as necessary for the actualization of mechanism, and finally (vi) effort and cost, knowledge, and training as factors influencing actualization.

Data Quality Improvement Strategies for Data Analysis Specific to the IT Industry

In the ever-evolving landscape of the IT industry, data acts as the foundational element driving decisions, strategies, and innovations. The quality of data significantly influences the operational efficiency, decision-making accuracy, customer satisfaction, and overall success of IT initiatives. Poor data quality leads to erroneous insights, and ineffective strategies, and could potentially cost companies millions, making data quality improvement not just an option but a critical necessity. This paper explores the multifaceted importance of maintaining high data quality in the IT industry and outlines various strategies for improvement. It talks about big-picture methods, including sorting out data, keeping it up-to-date, using technology to improve accuracy and trustworthiness, and ensuring timeliness. This article explains methods IT specialties and groups should use to check and fix their data quality. These steps will help keep the information accurate and valuable for better results in the future

Nostalgic Analysis of Big Data in Tourism by Business Intelligence

There are several unsuccessful IT initiatives in today's market among specialized small and medium-sized businesses due to a lack of control over the gap between the business and its goal. In other words, purchased products are not being sold, which is a regular occurrence in tourism retail businesses. These firms buy several trip packages from large corporations, which then expire because of a lack of demand, resulting in a cost rather than an investment. To address this issue, we suggest detecting flaws that restrict a firm by re-engineering processes, creating a business architecture based on emotional analysis, and allowing small and medium-sized tourist companies (SMEs) to make better decisions and evaluate data. Most people have it but don't know how to use it. In addition, a case study was conducted using a real-world corporation, comparing data before and after utilizing the suggested model to confirm the model's practicality. Business knowledge has been a critical review topic in the travel industry for more than ten years. The growth of vast amounts of information has become more noticeable. Huge information summaries cover topics like combining large amounts of information from external sources (like web content), deleting data from an information source, particularly unstructured data (like customer reviews), and gradually absorbing information, depending on the context. Company knowledge and vast information are only beginning to reach their full potential for the traveler business. The aforementioned trends are becoming increasingly important for travel companies to stay up with, given the fundamental functionality and applicability of online entertainment and item reviews in the travel sector. More advanced IT, as well as new algorithms and methodologies, particularly in the areas of online content mining and text mining, open up new application domains for business intelligence approaches that have already attracted a lot of studies.

Profiling the process development of Wurster coating for modified release capsule products in approved drug product applications

In this paper, we have studied Wurster Coating operation for the manufacture of modified release (MR) capsule products submitted to FDA as New Drug Applications (NDAs) and Abbreviated New Drug Applications (ANDAs) by using a data-driven approach. We have collected and classified information into Wurster coating associated process variables, quality attributes, and scale up strategies under Quality by Design (QbD) paradigm. We have quantified the importance and risk of the process variables and quality attributes by analyzing reported frequencies and risk factors, respectively. We have also included analysis of quality attributes listed with high risk factors, such as weight gain, particle size, assay, dissolution of coated beads, and water content/ Loss on drying (LOD) and the process variables with higher risk factors, such as product temperature, spray rate, atomization air pressure, Inlet air volume and Inlet air temperature, etc.We believe that the knowledge obtained through profiling Wurster coating operation will help the industry to further improve the quality of drug product applications regarding the development of this unit operation. We hope systematic profiling of pharmaceutical unit operations under QbD paradigm can provide support for FDA’s IT initiatives aiming at improving the efficiency and consistency of FDA’s quality assessment.

ComSoc Marketing Programs and Information Technology

Comsoc's Marketing Standing Committee oversees the marketing programs and works in collaboration with the Marketing staff for strategizing, planning, and implementing the BoG-approved marketing plan. ComSoc's Information Technology Standing Committee is to steer, plan, and oversee ComSoc's IT initiatives and projects to ensure that any current and future IT activities are well planned and are consistent with ComSoc's membership and financial interests. In this issue of the President's Page, I am pleased to introduce Fambirai Takawira, the ComSoc Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), and Rose Qingyang Hu, ComSoc Chief Information Officer (CIO), to share with you ComSoc ongoing activities and plans on IT and marketing.

Developing business process agility: Evidence from inter-organizational information systems of airlines and travel agencies

This research aims to investigate how external IT linkage, IT proactive stance, and analytical capabilities of IOS affect business process agility via the client's absorptive capacity; a structural equation modeling approach was adopted to evaluate the proposed model. The study's finding points to external effective Inter-organizational IT links that can drive the business processes modularization of airlines and enable them to create new business process performance by recombining business processes. Airlines and travel agencies can quickly and flexibly create new processes to respond to the dynamic market challenge through IT initiatives.

The Great Resignation: the great knowledge exodus or the onset of the Great Knowledge Revolution?

PurposeThe purpose of this Real Impact Viewpoint Article is to analyze the phenomenon of the Great Resignation from the knowledge management perspective.Design/methodology/approachIt applies the knowledge-based view of the firm to the notion of the Great Resignation, reviews the extant literature and relies on secondary data.FindingsThe Great Resignation has created numerous knowledge-related impacts on the individual, organizational and national levels. On the individual level, because of an accelerating adoption of freelancing, the future may witness an expansion of the category of the knowledge worker and a growing need for personal knowledge management methods and information technologies. Organizational effects include knowledge loss, reduced business process efficiency, damaged intra-organizational knowledge flows, lower relational capital, lost informal friendship networks, difficulty attracting the best human capital, undermined knowledge transfer processes and knowledge leakage to competition. Countries may also witness the depletion of national human capital.Practical implicationsManagers should learn how to use the available human capital more efficiently; realize the importance of universal succession planning programs; automate knowledge-centric business processes; facilitate knowledge-based IT initiatives by implementing self-functioning virtual communities, including enterprise social networks; restructure organizations to optimize intra-organizational knowledge flows; adjust strategies, products and target markets based on the available human capital; and create telecommuting conditions for people with disabilities who cannot be physically present. Knowledge management scholars are presented with a unique opportunity to convert the numerous theoretical insights accumulated within the boundaries of their discipline into practical application to facilitate the Great Knowledge Revolution.Originality/valueThis viewpoint offers managerial recommendations and inspires future Great Resignation investigations.

IT Governance Practices for The Success of IT Initiatives – A Conceptual Framework

In the recent day, it is important to understand the ways to govern Information Technology in an organization rather than just utilizing them. IT Governance is critical to most of the organization. It acts more of a strategic driver for business rather than just a supportive tool. The overall performance of an organization can be impacted by IT Governance. IT Governance helps to specify the responsibilities to encourage a desirable behavior from IT to generate value from IT investments. Unfortunately, in many organizations, this is more of an aspiration than reality. The objective of this study is to explore the current practices of IT Governance in a manufacturing firm. This paper analyses the 3 main mechanisms of IT Governance, i.e., structure, process, and relational mechanisms, with relation to the main 5 domains of the IT Governance; IT value delivery, IT resource management, IT performance measurement, IT strategic alignment and IT risk management. This study is aligned with existing literatures on the concept of IT Governance and addresses the gap from a practical approach.

Understanding Users Attitude towards Information Technology Application in University Libraries

In the present study, researchers aim to understand the attitude of users towards information technology application in two university libraries of north India, namely Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla and Panjabi University, Patiala. Survey method of research was used to collect data from the users. The sample consisted of 391 users, which included PG Students, Research Scholars and Faculty Members in the Faculties of Social Sciences and Sciences in both the universities. The data were collected through structured questionnaires and further analysed using the Chi-Square test and Kruskal-Wallis test. The data analysis and discussion reveals that despite a few number of library users being involved in the decision-making of IT application in libraries and availability of few training programmes on the know-how of IT systems, a positive attitude towards information technology application prevails among the library users in both the university libraries. In the end, some key recommendations are presented for deriving more benefits from future IT initiatives in libraries.

Does it Pay to Have CIOs on the Board? Creating Value by Appointing C-Level IT Executives to the Board of Directors

In an increasingly digital world, C-level information technology experts (CITEs) such as CIOs and CTOs are playing an increasingly indispensable role in leading IT initiatives. Despite this, recent research shows a lack of oversight by the board of directors over the IT function due to the “IT confidence gap” of directors with no IT expertise. This has resulted in the emergence of a recent trend of appointing CITEs to the board of directors. However, there is little research on whether such appointments result in value creation for the appointing firms. We use perspectives from agency and resource dependence theories to examine two value impacts of CITE director appointments to address this question. We suggest that CITE director appointments create signaling value by enhancing the firm’s ability to signal their intention to institute more effective oversight of the IT function and subsequently accumulate value in the form of share price reaction to appointment announcements. Correspondingly, CITE directors’ human and relational capital application also creates substantive value in the form of firm financial performance over a longer duration. Using an event study and hierarchical linear modeling, our analysis of 334 CITE director appointments largely supports our contention that the human and relational capital of CITE directors and their appointment in firms facing IT-related contextual conditions results in both a positive share price reaction and better firm financial performance over the long term. We conclude that appointing CITE directors with the appropriate capital under certain contextual conditions leads to firm value creation.

Platform, or technology project? A spectrum of six strategic ‘plays’ from UK government IT initiatives and their implications for policy

There is a markedly broad range of definitions and illustrative examples of the role played by governments themselves within the literature on government platforms. In response we conduct an inductive and deductive qualitative review of the literature to clarify this landscape and so to develop a typology of six definitions of government platforms, organised within three genres along a spectrum from fully centralised, through to fully decentralised. For each platform definition we offer illustrative ‘mini-cases’ drawn from the UK government experience as well as further insights and implications for each genre, drawn from the broader information systems literature on platforms. A range of benefits, risks, governance challenges, policy recommendations, and suggestions for further research are then identified and discussed.

An empirical study of COVID-19 related posts on Stack Overflow: Topics and technologies

The COVID-19 outbreak, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, has left its mark on every aspect of our lives and at the time of this writing is still an ongoing battle. Beyond the immediate global-wide health response, the pandemic has triggered a significant number of IT initiatives to track, visualize, analyze and potentially mitigate the phenomenon. For individuals or organizations interested in developing COVID-19 related software, knowledge-sharing communities such as Stack Overflow proved to be an effective source of information for tackling commonly encountered problems. As an additional contribution to the investigation of this unprecedented health crisis and to assess how fast and how well the community of developers has responded, we performed a study on COVID-19 related posts in Stack Overflow. In particular, we profiled relevant questions based on key post features and their evolution, identified the most prominent technologies adopted for developing COVID-19 software and their interrelations and focused on the most persevering problems faced by developers. For the analysis of posts we employed descriptive statistics, Association Rule Graphs, Survival Analysis and Latent Dirichlet Allocation. The results reveal that the response of the developers’ community to the pandemic was immediate and that the interest of developers on COVID-19 related challenges was sustained after its initial peak. In terms of the problems addressed, the results show a clear focus on COVID-19 data collection, analysis and visualization from/to the web, in line with the general needs for monitoring the pandemic.

Towards a framework for sustaining Green IT initiatives: an empirical investigation

Towards a framework for sustaining Green IT initiatives: an empirical investigation

Social Barriers in Business-IT Alignment in a Public Organization in Indonesia

The social dimension of alignment plays an important role in business-IT alignment (BITA). The study aimed to get in-depth knowledge of barriers in BITA by identifying and analyzing factors that inhibit alignment from the social perspective using as case study the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources (MEMR) of the Republic of Indonesia. Based on the data collected through semi-structured interviews and internal documents from this public organization in Indonesia, the data was thematic analyzed. The findings of the study are 15 social barriers in BITA in MEMR from which the following five are new social barriers in BITA: uncoordinated IT initiatives; sectoral ego; frequent rotation of executives in organizational structure; poor understanding of IT for growing; and the lack of support by the business in IT initiatives continuation. The findings of the study can be considered by other public organizations that aim to improve their alignment between business and IT, and finally their public service delivery.

A Carbon-Aware Incentive Mechanism for Greening Colocation Data Centers

The massive energy consumption of data centers worldwide has resulted in a large carbon footprint, raising serious concerns to sustainable IT initiatives and attracting a great amount of research attention. Nonetheless, the current efforts to date, despite encouraging, have been primarily centered around owner-operated data centers (e.g., Google data center), leaving out another major segment of data center industry-colocation data centers-much less explored. As a major hindrance to carbon efficiency desired by the operator, colocation suffers from “split incentive”: tenants may not be willing to manage their servers for carbon efficiency. In this paper, we aim at minimizing the carbon footprint of geo-distributed colocation data centers, while ensuring that the operator's cost meets a long-term budget constraint. We overcome the “split incentive” hurdle by devising a novel online carbon-aware incentive mechanism, called GreenColo, in which tenants voluntarily bid for energy reduction at self-determined prices and will receive financial rewards if their bids are accepted at runtime. Using trace based simulation we show that GreenColo results in a carbon footprint fairly close (23 versus 18 percent) to the optimal offline solution with future information, while being able to satisfy the colocation operator's long-term budget constraint. We demonstrate the effectiveness of GreenColo in practical scenarios via both simulation studies and scaled-down prototype experiments. Our results show that GreenColo can reduce the carbon footprint by up to 24 percent without incurring any additional cost for the colocation operator (compared to the no-incentive baseline case), while tenants receive financial rewards for “free” without violating service level agreement.

Innovations & Technology Based Initiatives in Mutual Fund Distribution Intermediation in India

The world of financial services is changing in ways that are more dramatic than we would have foreseen even five years ago. Taking a leaf from evolving ecosystem around mobile telephony, many financial institutions are using smart technology to remodel their branches into smarter point of sale. This has given a genesis to a terminology of “emerging distribution intermediaries” in financial services. Mutual funds (MF) being the combiner of various savings instruments are regarded as the ideal investment vehicle for today’s complex and modern financial scenario. But its penetration is poor. One of the major levers to increase penetration is innovations in distributing MF products. Considering this, Indian government & regulator have taken many policies reforms & IT initiatives towards increasing retail participation in Mutual Funds and equity markets in recent past. Through this paper, researcher has attempted to critically analyze these initiatives. Apart from highlighting various innovations in MF distributions, this paper will also highlight the present state of online Mutual Fund trading platforms. Further, the paper attempts to highlight the areas of concern, augmentation and intervention in this space.

Reconciling “doing good” and “doing well” in organizations’ green IT initiatives: A multi-case analysis

Organizations considering green IT initiatives seek to reconcile two significant goals: environmental sustainability (“doing good”) and business profitability (“doing well”). These two purposes, however, are not necessarily aligned and can engender a dilemma in which investing to achieve environmental sustainability may threaten business profitability to some extent. Thus, this research builds on the theoretical perspective of corporate ecological responsiveness and proposes three types of strategic drivers for green IT initiatives (economic, authority, and moral drivers). How various types of organizations may be motivated by these green IT initiative drivers will affect whether organizations can reconcile the objectives of environmental sustainability and business profitability. We further deduce findings from multiple case studies of eight organizations in China and Singapore. The findings illustrate that the characteristics of any given organization influence why various driving factors affect their green IT initiative decisions. Additionally, “doing good” and “doing well” are reconciled when organizations consider the short-term investment and long-term benefit, design appropriate strategy, and receive severe external pressure. We also discuss contributions to research and practice.

Digitization of Tax Administration in India

Digitization has become an increasingly important aspect of tax administration in India. Digitization is the process by which technology lowers the costs of storing, sharing, and analysing data. This article discusses the meaning and significance of digitization, along with the concepts of digital economy and knowledge economy. Thereafter it discusses the digital tools developed and other IT initiatives taken for various types of taxes such as income tax and GST. This discussion enables us to understand the benefits of digitization for tax administration in India such as cost reduction and better compliance.

How a Low-Margin Business Cocreated Analytics Value through an Innovation Partnership

Many IT departments face strict budgetary constraints, limiting their ability to meet business managers’ demands to create value with new technologies. As a consequence, tech-savvy business managers launch their own IT initiatives—a trend called shadow IT. This article describes how a business unit partnered with a technology vendor to cocreate an innovative, revenue-generating, analytics solution. Our analysis of the process used to develop this solution provides recommendations for businesses trying to cocreate analytics-based value.