A Social Linkage View on the Business Value of IT

Daniel Beimborn University of Bamberg, Germany

Nils Joachim University of Bamberg, Germany

Frank Schlosser University of Bamberg, Germany

Tim Weitzel University of Bamberg, Germany

Abstract
Our research intends to explore whether a social perspective on IT business alignment can help shed light on the IT value creation process by considering different facets of interpersonal linkage. In this paper, we develop a theoretical model which could be discussed at the JAIS workshop. Further, we use some empirical data from 149 US banks in order to find first empirical evidence whether our research focus represents a promising direction. We find initial support for our main hypotheses that communication, cross-domain knowledge and mutuality among and between IT and business staff significantly impact IT usage and business process outcomes. The final results of our research could contribute to our understanding of how the IT resource should be understood and used to measurably contribute to firm goals. The initial findings support the caveat of recent studies suggesting that informal aspects of alignment might be quite notable (e.g. Chan, 2002) and show that our theoretical understanding of alignment should be extended to better incorporate social aspects of daily work life.

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Reference:	Beimborn, D., Joachim, N., Schlosser, F., Weitzel, T. (2008). "A Social Linkage View on the Business Value of IT," Proceedings > Proceedings of JAIS Theory Development Workshop . Sprouts: Working Papers on Information Systems, 8(26). http://sprouts.aisnet.org/8-26
Keywords:	IT Business Alignment, Business-Internal Alignment, Inter-Departmental Social Linkage, Banking Industry
Item Type:	Article - Volume 8 Article 26 (2008)
Language:	English
Email:	Daniel Beimborn (beimborn@is-bamberg.de) Nils Joachim (joachim@is-bamberg.de) Frank Schlosser (schlosser@is-bamberg.de) Tim Weitzel (weitzel@is-bamberg.de)

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