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Aligning individual and organizational values to facilitate information systems adoption

Published: 05 November 2004 Publication History

Abstract

This research examines the importance of organizational alignment for information systems success. Alignment means that internal practices such as pay, promotion, staff selection, retention and organizational structure should positively support organizational efforts to change and innovate. Good alignment should be vital for information systems, as it will provide an environment where change is actively supported.
To examine the importance of alignment a questionnaire was administered to 50 employees of a 300-person company. This sample of 16% of the population was randomly selected while ensuring all 9 departments were represented. Overall the company did not appear to be aligned, with only 26% feeling rewarded for innovations and 40% not feeling integral to the company. These results help understand the information system implementation difficulties the organization experienced.
The conclusion is that before starting an information systems project, organizational alignment should be checked. If there is poor alignment it is likely the new information system will encounter difficulties and delays. Wider organizational changes may be needed first to align pay, promotion, staff selection and retention to facilitate the adoption of new systems. This is a significant finding as it indicates wider organizational issues need to be addressed first for information systems success.

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cover image ACM Conferences
WISER '04: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM workshop on Interdisciplinary software engineering research
November 2004
96 pages
ISBN:1581139888
DOI:10.1145/1029997
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 05 November 2004

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Author Tags

  1. alignment
  2. creativity
  3. culture
  4. implementation
  5. information systems
  6. innovation
  7. motivation

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