Start Date
10-12-2017 12:00 AM
Description
To increase the performance of IT-intensive organizations, mutual understanding between business and IT professionals has proven to be crucially important. In turn, architecture management – leading to modularization and flexibilization of an organization’s IT infrastructure – drives the level of mutual understanding. While previous studies agree on this finding, conceptualizations on mutual understanding are quite dispersed. In our study, we focus on the differing effects of business process modularity and IT flexibility on operational and strategic aspects of mutual understanding. We combine two theoretical lenses to describe this linkage: the template theory to explain the sense-making process and the work system theory to consider different perspectives on a business system. Based on 119 survey results, we find that modularity does not enable business/IT mutual understanding per se. It rather depends on a perfect match of functional and technical aspects. Thus, we determined limited effects of architecture management on mutual understanding.
Recommended Citation
Jentsch, Christian; Beimborn, Daniel; and Reitz, Andreas, "Templates for joined work systems – How business process modularity and IT flexibility enable mutual understanding among business and IT" (2017). ICIS 2017 Proceedings. 19.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2017/General/Presentations/19
Templates for joined work systems – How business process modularity and IT flexibility enable mutual understanding among business and IT
To increase the performance of IT-intensive organizations, mutual understanding between business and IT professionals has proven to be crucially important. In turn, architecture management – leading to modularization and flexibilization of an organization’s IT infrastructure – drives the level of mutual understanding. While previous studies agree on this finding, conceptualizations on mutual understanding are quite dispersed. In our study, we focus on the differing effects of business process modularity and IT flexibility on operational and strategic aspects of mutual understanding. We combine two theoretical lenses to describe this linkage: the template theory to explain the sense-making process and the work system theory to consider different perspectives on a business system. Based on 119 survey results, we find that modularity does not enable business/IT mutual understanding per se. It rather depends on a perfect match of functional and technical aspects. Thus, we determined limited effects of architecture management on mutual understanding.