NOKOBIT-98
Sesjon 1:1a
Key Issues in Information Systems Management in Norway: An Empirical Study Dag H. Olsen1, Tom R. Eikebrokk1 and Maung K. Sein2 1
Institutt for Informasjonsvitenskap Høgskolen i Agder
[email protected],
[email protected]
2
Georgia State University
[email protected]
ABSTRACT This article presents an empirical study of key IS issues among Norwegian IS managers. We look at which issues the IS managers perceive as most important. In addition we test how the perception of key issue importance is moderated by industry type and position. We find that four issues are significantly correlated with industry type or IS manager position.
INTRODUCTION It is generally believed that information systems (IS) management issues become increasingly important in the global economy (e.g. Watson et al., 1997) A number of surveys have investigated the assessments of key IS issues in several countries. The stream of research initially started in the Unites States in the early 1980s. The Society for Information Management (SIM) in cooperation with the MIS research center at the University of Minnesota and others, has periodically surveyed its members periodically since 1980. (Dicson et al., 1984; Brancheau et al., 1996). These surveys provide a valuable insight into the evolution of the MIS discipline and the professional applications of it. Later, a number of studies have surveyed the key IS management issues in other countries. An overview can be found in Watson et al. (1997) The purpose of this article is to determine the key IS management issues in Norway, and test a set of hypotheses about differences in key issues in different industries. We will address the following research questions:
What are the key IS management issues facing IS managers in Norway?
Are there differences in the importance of the issues between different industries?
The results can give valuable input to people who needs to be aware of IS managers key concerns. Researchers, educators, consultants and IS vendors need to know what issues have priority among the people who makes the decisions about IS purchases, development and implementation. As researchers and educators, we form and convey assessments about which IS issues are prominent in the industry. We need to check our assessments with reality. IS managers assessments have significant bearing on what the markets for IS personnel, solutions and services will be in the future. Moreover, for IS managers it can provide a measure of benchmarking. Knowing which issues have priority among his/her colleagues can help the individual manager
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Sesjon 1:1a assess how correct his/her assessments are. It can provide IS managers with insight into what strategic impacts can be expected from the IS investments of competitors. Research on key issues and the shaping factors does also give important input into research on the effects of IT investments. By understanding what issues guides IT investments, we can also be better able to understand investment decisions and their success. We will in the extension of this work look at how the Norwegian key issues compare to those reported in other countries. From a number of IS cases in different industries, we conjecture that Norwegian companies are among the first to embrace new IT technology. It is therefore interesting to examine the external factors that impact the assessment of IS issues. This can be factors such economic structure, technological status and characteristics of the national culture. The business environment is becoming increasingly complex and at the same time more global. We see an accelerating speed in which ideas are transmitted around the world. Companies that want to prosper need to be aggressive and proactive. The IT resource is a critical enabler, and it is therefore essential that the IS management is aligned with strategic business objectives. Monitoring markets developments and competitor moves is important. Monitoring developments in different technologies, in particular information technology, will be important. It will therefore also be important to assess which IS issues get most attention among other actors in the industry.
THEORY The Society for Information Management (SIM) has periodically surveyed its members periodically since 1980 (Dicson et al., 1984; Brancheau et al., 1996). The SIM surveys classify the key issues into four groups to assist with the interpretation and discussion (Niederman et al. 1991, Brancheau et al., 1996). The groups are Technology Infrastructure (TI), Business Relationships (BR), Internal Effectiveness (IE), and Technology Application (TA). The key issues are described in appendix A, and are grouped in appendix B. Issues that focus on planning and control for network connectivity, information access and data storage are classified as Technology Infrastructure issues. The focus is on the technology components needed to support modern applications in businesses. This is a category that has risen in importance in the last two SIM studies, signifying the importance of responsive technology infrastructures that rapidly can respond to changes in the competitive environment. Issues that focus on the problems of managing the relationship between the business enterprise and the IS function, such as strategic planning, organizational learning, and IS organization alignment, are classified as Business Relationship issues. These issues focus on external management concerns. These issues were most prominent in the SIM studies during the mid and late 1980s. They still are important, but have been passed by the concerns for the technology infrastructure. The issues that deal with the basic activities of the IS function, such as software development, IS effectivity measurement and IS human relations, are classified as Internal Effectiveness issues. The focus of these issues is on planning and control of the IS function. The importance of these issues has been stable in the SIM surveys, and less prominent than the above two categories. The Technology Application category has been least prominent in the SIM studies, and have declined in importance during the last surveys. This category includes issues such as end-user computing, collaborative support, and executive/decision support. These issues are related to the application of specific classes of information technology on enterprises. This signifies the fact that IS managers do not have time to focus on specific applications. They are occupied with the broader responsibilities of technology infrastructure and business relationships.
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NOKOBIT-98 External factors such as economic structure, technological status and national culture have been proposed as explanations of differences in key issues (Watson et al., 1997). Also internal factors such as the IS manager’s relationship with the CEO and information scanning behavior have been shown to influence the perception of key issues (Watson, 1990). When IS managers are members of the management team, it is more likely that the IT strategy will be in line with the overall business strategy, and that this alignment will be reflected in the perceived key issues. It has been demonstrated that coherence between IT strategy and overall business strategy gives positive bottom line contributions from IT investments (Bergeroon and Raymond, 1995).
RESEARCH MODEL Watson et al. (1997) stresses the importance of key-issue studies in different countries. They advocate that such studies adopt the format and issues of the SIM key issue studies. This will allow meta-studies and enhance the comparison of results. We therefore adopted the ranked issues in the latest SIM study. We will in this paper rank the key issues for Norwegian IS managers, and look for differences across industry and manager position. This study model is depicted in the upper part of figure 1. In subsequent papers we will study the differences between the Norwegian key issues and the SIM key issues, as well as the key issues from international and other national studies. Internal factors Industry Type Assessment of IS key issues
IS manager position
External factors
National Culture Economic Structure Technological Status
Figure 1. IS key issues study model The importance of IS issues and categories of IS issues shifts over time. Possible external factors influencing the perceptions of key issues are the economic structure, technological status and national culture of the environment in which the enterprise is working (Watson et al., 1997, Mata et al., 1997). This is illustrated in the lower part of figure 1. Norwegian enterprises are generally perceived as early adopters of new technology. A number of cases support the argument that this also applies to information technology. Examples are the early proliferation of internet banking services among small savings banks, the early adoption of Lotus Notes groupware in companies, and the fact that Norway is on the top when it comes to using the newest processor technology. Norway also has an advanced economy. One general hypothesis is therefore that the ranking of key issues in Norway is close to the ranking in the most advanced economies.
RESEARCH METHOD We adopted the 20 ranked key issues from the 1994-95 SIM Delphi results. These issues were translated and discussed with a small number of IS managers, and sent to a pilot group of 10 IS managers. Eight of these managers responded.
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Sesjon 1:1a We selected our sample population among members of Den Norske Dataforening (DND) -- the Norwegian Computer Society. This is a association of IT/IS professionals, and thus have more comprehensive membership than SIM. To obtain a similar sample profile as the SIM studies, we selected members that were identified as senior IS executives in the DND yearbook. 599 members were identified as senior IS managers. During the spring of 1997, questionnaires were distributed to these managers. 120 managers responded. The survey questionnaire is shown in appendix C. The managers were asked to rate each of the issues on a scale from 1 to 10, where 10 indicated the most important issue(s) and 1 indicated the least important issue(s). The respondents were also requested to check their industry and position. The issues were then ranked on the basis of the mean scores. We also checked the significances of the differences in the mean scores (µ). We conducted one-way analysis of variance for each of the hypothesis below: H1: The mean score of issue i (µi) is different from the mean score of issue j (µj) for some i,j, i≠j. In order to investigate the effects of industry type, we lumped the respondents in the education (6 respondents) and public organizations (24 respondents) categories into one new category “nonprofit organizations”. We checked the significances of differences in ranking between the following industries: manufacturing organizations, service organizations, private organizations (manufacturing + service org.), and non-profit organizations. We conducted one-way analysis of variance for each of the hypothesis below: H2a-d: The mean score of issue i (µi) for industry x is different from the mean score of issue i (µi) for industry y for some i, x≠y. In order to investigate the potential effects of position type, we analyzed the differences between senior IS executives and “non-executives”. This new category was created by lumping the three “non-executive” categories. The new category consisted of 30 respondents. We checked the significances of the differences in the ranking between IS-executives and IS non-executives. Through a one sample t-test, we tested the following hypothesis: H3: The mean score of issue i (µi) for IS executives is different from the mean score of issue i (µi) for IS non-executives for some i.
RESULTS Table 1 shows the ranking of the key issues as well as the matrix of significant differences between the means of the scores. Significant differences are represented by the symbol ** in the table. It is evident from this table that Norwegian IS managers do evaluate some issues as more important that others (H1). We see that the most important IS issues facing Norwegian IS managers are: ARCH -- Developing and implementing an information architecture, and STPLAN -- Improving IS strategic planning. These issues have significantly higher scores than all other issues, except for EFUSE -- Making effective use of the data resource. For a description of these issues, see appendix A. Issues ranked fourth through ninth are not significantly different.
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NOKOBIT-98 Table 1. Significant differences in the importance of issues µ
ARCH
A R C H
S T P L A N
E F U S E
A D V A N T
I N F R A
I S R O L E
E D I
N E T W K
E U C
A L I G N
I S _ H R
L E A R N
C O L L A B
I S _ E F F
O U T
S W D E V
B P R
L E G A C Y
D I S S Y S
7.92
STPLAN
7.90
EFUSE
7.67
-
-
ADVANT
7.50
**
**
INFRA
7.39
**
ISROLE
7.39
**
-
**
*
-
**
*
-
-
EDI
7.38
**
**
*
-
-
-
NETWK
7.32
**
**
**
-
-
-
-
EUC
7.28
**
**
**
ALIGN
7.07
**
**
**
**
*
*
*
IS_HR
6.98
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
*
*
-
LEARN
6.91
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
-
-
COLLAB
6.87
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
-
-
-
-
-
IS_EFF
6.66
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
*
-
-
OUT
6.60
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
-
-
-
SWDEV
6.53
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
*
*
-
-
BPR
6.49
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
*
-
-
LEGACY
6.18
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
*
-
DISSYS
6.13
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
*
-
MVNDR
6.08
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
**
-
- not significant
* p
