Abstract

Firms inevitably go through transitions of both business strategy and Information Systems (IS) strategy to adapt to changing needs to remain competitive. While existing literature has provided important insights into various configurations of alignment between business and IS strategy archetypes (e.g., Sabherwal et al. 2019), less is understood about the role of strategy specifically times of transition and adjustment between strategies. Much of the existing business value of IT and strategy literature has focused on examining strategies during specific periods or conditions but has provided limited insights into when, why, and how firms shift to different strategies to meet competitive needs. To gain further insight into these shifts in strategy, we intend to use the business “strategy palette” proposed by Reeves and Haanaes (2015) which has six business classifications to capture business strategies at a more granular level over time (as compared to the Miles and Snow [1978] typology). Additionally, we plan to also use an information systems typology (IS Innovators, IS Conservators, and IS Ambidexterity; Chen et al. 2010, Sabherwal et al. 2019) to classify firms’ IS strategies over time. A primary research question that we intend to investigate centers around the amount of time it takes for an IS strategy to align with firms’ business strategies during a leading change in business strategy due to prior firm performance. Similarly, we expect that there are also instances where new innovations in technology and subsequent IS strategies can lead the change during a transition period and may act as the primary driver that requires the business strategy to follow suit. To investigate these points of interest, we will leverage data from COMPUSTAT and a proprietary dataset that has 10,187 firm-year observations and 2,237 unique publicly traded firms over a 10-year period from 2011 to 2020 to measure firm performance and classify both business and IS strategies. For the method, we plan to use feasible generalized least squares (GLS) an economics-based method to assess the panel data. By exploring the relationship between business and IS strategy specifically during transitions, we hope to provide value to both practitioners and academia by identifying firms that can achieve better firm performance through the transitioning of business and IS strategies and how they achieved a successful transition.

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