Assessing the relationships among information technology flexibility, strategic alignment, and information technology effectiveness

• Main Author: Ness, Lawrence R
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2005
• Subjects: Automation; Competition; Competitive advantage; Correlation analysis; Effectiveness; Information Technology; Management; Strategic planning; Studies
• ISBN: 9780542182419; 0542182416

Increased competitive pressures upon businesses are continuing to escalate, generating the need for greater firm-level efficiency and productivity. Breakthroughs in technology-based services and solutions are driving frequent, rapid, and unplanned changes in business strategies along with the resultant demand upon information technology for supporting services and solutions required to achieve sustained competitive advantage. The degree to which information technology (IT) can effectively and efficiently deliver these services and solutions is known as IT effectiveness. Strategic alignment has traditionally been viewed as the means to achieve greater IT delivery capabilities, but recent research and trends seem to indicate a growing awareness as to the need for IT flexibility as a means of achieving IT effectiveness. However, there has been a lack of empirical evidence as to the relationships between IT flexibility, IT effectiveness, and/or strategic alignment to validate their relationships and to analyze which, if any, factor has a higher correlation with IT effectiveness. This study, therefore, focuses on the strength of these three relationships and to assess the evidence for the assertion that IT flexibility has a greater influence on IT effectiveness than does strategic alignment. The results of this research provide empirical evidence supporting the research hypotheses that a positive relationship exists among these three areas. Additionally, the data confirmed that IT flexibility does have a stronger relationship with IT effectiveness than does strategic alignment. In fact, the inclusion of strategic alignment does not improve the prediction power of the construct model, in that IT flexibility carries the weight of explanatory effect of ITE within the construct model.