The Information Technology Reporting Structure and Firm Performance: A Configurational Approach

With the increasing recognition of the strategic role of information technology (IT) in modern organizations, prior studies have called for a direct reporting relationship between the IT head and the chief executive officer. Unlike prior studies that focus on the effect of IT reporting on firm performance, we propose a configurational lens to assess how several factors, such as firm size, industry, IT investment intensity, and the strategic role of IT in a firm, combine to determine IT reporting structure that yields high performance. Viewing firms as configurations based on different combinations of contextual causal conditions, we examine the optimal IT reporting structure for different configurations by using a configurational approach and a corresponding method, the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. We discuss implications for research and practice.