Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
7.6.5 Investment Governance
Governance is an important feature of ICT management. At a federal level, however,
“most CIOs lack the direct control over the bulk of IT spending” (Tech America,
2013, p. 6). Subsequently, federal CIOs argue that they cannot be responsible for
how public agencies invest in ICT when given little budgetary control and powers.
The spread of ICT investment control cuts across three institutional structures:
department CIO, component/bureau CIO, and program office. Investment gover-
nance is a major issue for public organizations when department CIOs have little
or no control over vast proportions of ICT budgets, and consequently, the value of
ICT investments is negated and thus greatly impacting on the degree of alignment.
The main reason for why most organizations (85%) are neither highly aligned nor
highly effective is that core and support functions unilaterally develop ICT with
complete disregard for the bigger picture, resulting in an overlap of ICT systems.
This unnecessarily creates substantial layers of complexity that support short-term
purpose but gradually corrode strategic performance (Shpilberg et al., 2007).
7.6.6 Resistance to Change
Within public organizations, change is often viewed with suspicion. The transition
to ICT-dependency mode requires “significant culture change which takes time to
develop both from an IS and business perspective” (Burn, 1996, p. 8). Although
ICT stimulates transformation, the process requires continual adjustment and
improvisation based on broad-based understanding, resulting in large-scale dif-
ferences made to the profile of work enacted and changes in knowledge, level and
style of interaction among organizational members, work allocation, accountabil-
ity, responsibility and control, and coordination activities (Orlikowski, 1996). As
pointed out by McDonagh (in press), ICT-enabled change, especially as it relates
to the public sector, is strongly contingent on an effective organizational diag-
nosis to craft and execute a strategic response that will guide a series of focused
change interventions. Such interventions must fully consider important elements
such as organizational practices (Floyd, Cornelissen, & Delios, 2011; Hendry &
Seidl, 2003), organizational processes (Bizzi & Langley, 2012; Feldman, 2004),
and organizational routines (Polites & Karahanna, 2013). A good example of this
particular impediment would point to the concept of “strategy blindness” and the
impact of “cognitive entrenchment” (Arvidsson, Holmstrom, & Lyytinen, 2014).
7.7 Crafting a Process Approach to Strategic Alignment
The manner in which strategies emerge and develop is referred to as the strategy
process. Strategy process considers the “how, who and when of strategy” (De Wit &
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