Managing the Toughest Transition: Part 2

The “toughest transition” IT managers must make is rising up to a new level of competency and accountability required by an economic climate demanding quantifiable results that boost an organization's bottom-line profits. Part 1, which appeared in the Spring 2003 issue, focused on the challenges new IT leaders experience as they begin this transition. Part 2 takes a closeup look at one of these new leaders as she prepares to lead a multi-location team.     

The Must-Have Competency

Of all the competencies that contribute to the sustainable effectiveness of information technology leaders and managers, what is the “must-have competency”? What competency enables highly successful IT professionals to stand out from the crowd and establish a track record of influential, effective, and long-lasting relationships with colleagues and customers on all levels? What competency can be the tie-breaker in final interview situations when all the candidates look alike on paper? This article focuses on an often-observed but less often-discussed competency that may be difficult to define but is easily recognized.     

Have we Forgotten the Fundamental it Enabler: Ease of Use

“I asked for a glass of water and got a hose in the face.” That's how one IT customer explained to his IS manager the latest and greatest e-mail system that their company installed. the system simply overwhelmed users with its myriad of functions. It seems that as computers and software grow more powerful, they are also growing too complex for most IT customers to use. This article is a reminder that using information technology should help people accomplish tasks and not be a task itself.     

The CIO stereotype: Content,bias, and impact

The current work examines whether there is a stereotype of CIOs that can influence decisions about their role in organizations. We find evidence for a CIO stereotype informed by both an IT stereotype and a general leader stereotype, although CIOs are perceived to have more in common with IT personnel than leaders. Two experiments showed that the CIO stereotype was capable of biasing perceptions of CIOs’ suitability to occupy strategic roles (i.e., a “glass ceiling” effect) and the extent to which they are blamed for negative outcomes (i.e., a “glass cliff” effect). These findings point to the challenges CIOs face in gaining and maintaining strategic leadership roles in organizations.     

Wearing two hats: analyst-managers for small software projects

With the evolution of software development, companies have changed their project methodology and are asking IT employees to evolve with them. The business analyst talks to users, ironing out the details of what they wanted and balancing that wish list against what an IT system could economically or practically deliver. The business analyst also ensures that users develop business processes to support the software. The actual task of writing the software falls to a project manager and his team of software developers. Today, companies commonly ask IT managers to assume the business analyst role in addition to their duties as project manager, especially in small projects. This article discusses how IT managers can successfully navigate the thin line between business analyst and project manager.     

Information technology capability and firm performance: Role of industry

Despite several calls for considering industry in the IS value research, few studies investigated the relationship between benefits of IT and industries. This study extends Chae et al. (2014) by investigating how industry influences the relationship between IT capability and business performance. Unexpectedly, it finds that the control group in the industries in which the "transform" IT strategic role dominates showed superior performance than the IT leader. Also, the IT leaders in the "automate" IT strategic industry did not exhibit better business performance than the control firms. We discuss the implications of these findings.     

Internet anxiety: An empirical study of the effects of personality,beliefs, and social support

We examined sources of Internet anxiety; specifically modeling the ties from broad dispositional traits (computer anxiety, computer self-efficacy, and personal innovativeness with IT), beliefs about the work environment (about the adequacy of resources and trust in technology), and two forms of social support for IT (leader and peer support) to individuals’ anxiety about using Internet applications. We tested our model using respondents who participated in virtual teams during a 16-week period. Our findings suggested that Internet anxiety was affected both by the users’ personality and by beliefs that can be influenced by providing adequate resources to support the technology, encourage trust in technology, and working to assure users that leaders and peers are supportive of their using the technology. Our findings suggest that by providing appropriate resources and fostering a supportive environment, leaders could reduce Internet anxiety and thus influence the use of technology in the workplace in ways that benefit organizations.     

Bounded confidence opinion dynamics with opinion leaders and environmental noises

Opinion dynamics is a kind of collective decision-making process and focuses on the study of evolution and formation of opinions within a human society. Particularly, bounded confidence rule is one of intrinsic interaction principles in the opinion dynamics. In this paper, a leader–follower opinion dynamics model is built, with the help of the bounded confidence rule, to consider the opinion formation of a community, which is constituted of opinion leaders and opinion followers. At the same time, environmental uncertainties are considered in the opinion formation and called as environmental noises, which are modeled as Gaussian stochastic processes. All the agents are assumed to have heterogeneous confidence levels. Then the impacts of the opinion leaders and the environmental noises on the final opinions of the opinion followers are analyzed. Finally, some simulation results are presented to demonstrate the collective opinion evolution in three cases: no opinion leader, single opinion leader and multiple opinion leaders.     

In search of Europe's information technology leaders: review of methods and empirical evidence

Abstract. Information technology (IT) leaders — companies that successfully exploit IT to achieve business results — generate immense interest among practitioners and academics. From a practitioner's perspective, IT leaders provide benchmarks of leading IT management practices which others may emulate to achieve success. From an academic perspective, IT leaders provide the 'data' for the creation of frameworks and theories of IT management. While US IT leaders are regularly assessed by academics, trade magazines, consultants and benchmarking firms, there has been no Europe-wide assessment of IT leadership. This neglect is detrimental to European IT practitioners and academics who may discover that American IT management practices are not transferrable in the European context. In this article, we analyse the construct, context and statistical validity of six methods for identifying European IT leaders. Based on this analysis, two methods (expert ratings and citation counts) were used to generate a preliminary list of European IT leaders and laggards. While individual experts were reticent about volunteering their ratings, their collective view appears to generate a worthwhile list with high construct validity. Citation counts represent a more accessible process for list generation, with high statistical validity. However, an attempt to correlate expert ratings with a list based on citation counts confirms that the latter has questionable construct validity.     

The influence of ethnicity on organizational commitment and merit pay of IT workers: the role of leader support

Projections of looming shortages in the supply of skilled IT workers, along with high employee replacement costs, make employee attraction, retention and support a pressing concern for organizations. One potential remedy for these shortages is to focus more attention on historically underrepresented groups. We explore ways organizations can support ethnic minority IT professionals to enhance their career success. Integrating affective, cognitive and social perspectives through affective events theory and social exchange theory, our objective is to explore the implications of ethnic minority status for the relationship between leader support (i.e., mentoring and leader–member exchange (LMX)) and subjective and objective indicators of career success (i.e., organizational commitment and merit pay) among IT workers. To test the model, we conducted a field study of 289 IT workers in a Fortune 500 company. Our results showed that LMX influenced organizational commitment for ethnic minorities, while career mentoring and LMX influenced organizational commitment for majorities. Psychosocial mentoring influenced merit pay for ethnic minorities, while neither LMX nor mentoring influenced merit pay for majorities. Our study contributes to the literature on IT personnel issues by exploring how and why these leader support mechanisms enhance organizational commitment and merit pay for IT workers. Moreover, we demonstrate that ethnicity is an important consideration for researchers studying organizational commitment, merit pay, mentoring and LMX. Our findings suggest that managers can boost organizational commitment among IT workers by focusing on LMX and career mentoring. Moreover, they may want to place particular emphasis on psychosocial mentoring and interventions to enhance LMX for their ethnic minority IT workers.     

Erp Packages: What's Next?

The traditional focus of IT operations no longer meets the challenges of tomorrow's fast-changing business environment. in the new millennium, CIOs will be required to shift their focus from internal information processing to external information processing. By taking on the role of “corporate antenna” and generating the business intelligence that matters, IT will, for the first time in history, start to exercise its true strategic role on corporate operations.     

Prospering in a transition economy through information technology-supported organizational learning

Abstract.  This paper presents the findings of a longitudinal study of the Slovenian company Sava during its 1995–2004 transition period when it adapted to and prospered in a free market economy. The company is particularly interesting because of its successful transition from a socialist company operating in a protected market to a privatized company operating in a capitalist global market, as well as the pivotal role of information technology (IT)-supported organizational learning that brought about radical change and successful transition. Our investigation of Sava's experiences demonstrates how the company's increasing attention to organizational learning, integration of working and learning, and its constant innovation of products and processes created new needs for IT support that motivated the adoption of new IT systems (such as Lotus Notes, document management systems, SAP), which in turn increased Sava's capacity to learn. Furthermore, our study reveals how the role of IT systems in organizational learning depends on the nature of learning (single-loop, double-loop or triple-loop learning) and the organizational level at which learning takes place (individual, group/department or organization). By providing insight into the emergence of distinct types of IT-supported learning and their vital role in Sava's successful transition, the paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the relationship between IT and organizational learning that is relevant and inspiring to other companies, especially those operating in transition economies.     

Network associate's McAfee online

Network Associate's McAfee Online is a multi-purpose resource site ideal for the IT manager who is not merely content with quarterly updates, but who wants cutting edge information on demand. The Virus Information Library http://vil.mcafee.com/villib contains detailed information on thousands of viruses — from whence they came, how they infect your system, and how to remove them.     

Organisational champions of IT innovation

This paper reports on an investigation of the characteristics of 10 organisational champions of information technology (IT) innovation in The Netherlands. The institutions at which they work are in the financial, transport, government and software sectors. Much of the research in this area has focused considerable attention on the individual personality traits of champions. This research project was positioned to contribute to the literature by broadening the focus of attention beyond individual-level characteristics. Since IT innovations occur within an organisational context, there is also a need to explore the role of organisation-level characteristics. This study explored both the individual- and the organisation-level characteristics exhibited by those promoting IT innovations in their firms. The results of this study show that these organisational champions fall somewhere in between the classic IT champion and the project manager. While personal leadership characteristics are not as much in evidence, organisational characteristics are emphasised more. They use their political skills to obtain resources and organisational acceptance of the IT innovations as they are shepherding the innovation through the organisational bureaucracy. However, these champions seem to place as much emphasis on creativity as classic IT champions. When necessary, they break rules, give veiled threats and find ways to get around the organisational bureaucracy. They seek creative outlets for themselves and those they manage. These findings suggests that a promising way to reduce the rate of information system (IS) project failures is to learn not only from IS projects undertaken by IT champions but also from innovation undertaken by other champions — business champions and champions of other technologies.     

Collaborative technologies in knowledge telework: an exploratory study

Abstract.  Knowledge workers in distributed work environments require substantial communication with colleagues and supervisors to perform their work activities, and collaborative technologies, like groupware, continue to improve the potential for such communication. This study investigates how an improvement in collaborative technology among a group of knowledge teleworkers impacts their communication patterns. The study focuses on one communication-based work process: knowledge sharing. The research involves a 6-month exploratory longitudinal case study of a group of teleworkers where a new groupware technology was implemented. The results indicate that while there are fewer instances of communication among group members after the technology is implemented, communication becomes more centralized around the district manager. These results suggest that increased collaborative technologies result in an adjustment between explicit and tacit knowledge sharing, as the availability of a centralized and updateable database reduces workgroup communications. However, consistent with structuration theory, telework group members do use communication technologies to address their most apparent needs and concerns. Other potential explanations and implications of these findings are discussed.     

With Service Level Agreements, Less is More

Service level agreements (SLAs) are formal negotiated agreements that enable IT organizations and their customers to collaboratively identify, discuss, and manage IT service expectations. Despite their potential, however, not all SLAs are successful. Based on experiences with numerous companies, the author argues that a tendency to “overcomplexify” is a major cause for SLA efforts to fail.     

The business value of information technology as measured by technical efficiency: Evidence from country-level data

The value of information technology (IT) in a business production process has long been a debatable issue. Explanation of the so-called “productivity paradox” has been one of the central topics in this arena. Much work has focused on firm-level analyses. This paper investigates IT contribution at a country level, using production theory in microeconomics. It negates the relationship between IT value and productivity based on grouping of countries, when the individual analytical method is applied and technical efficiency is used as the performance criterion. Findings obtained by applying stochastic production frontiers to a comprehensive country-level panel data set suggest that the IT contributions, as determined by the increase or decrease in the technical efficiency, to individual countries differ in magnitude from a production frontier to another, but are robust. It also shows that IT spending does not necessarily improve technical efficiencies of individual countries, regardless of whether they are developed or developing countries, and that given technological changes, the so-called productivity paradox may exist in a country, no matter whether it is a developed or developing nation. Finally, the significant implications of the findings are presented.     

Proactive or reactive IT leaders? A test of two competing hypotheses of IT innovation and environment alignment

When does it benefit a firm to take a lead in innovation with information technology (IT)? How should a firm align its IT innovation with a dynamic industry? In addressing these questions we present a typology of IT Innovation and Environment Alignment (ITIEA) based on a firm's IT innovation strategic orientation and the industry environment. The traditional ‘fit’ perspective predicts that a firm that matches its IT innovation with a dynamic environment would obtain performance benefits. In contrast, the ‘options’ perspective suggests that a firm that takes advantage of a stable environment to proactively pursue IT innovation and develop IT capability as real options would obtain performance advantage. We employ a quasi-experiment design to test these two competing hypotheses using archival data of IT leaders over a time frame of 6 years. We perform a longitudinal analysis of the performance change trajectories of proactive and reactive IT leaders over time. The results indicate a general support for the ‘options’ perspective that proactive IT leaders that lead in innovation with IT in relatively stable environments are found to consistently outperform reactive IT leaders in overall performance, allocative efficiency, and cost efficiency in management process. However, interestingly, the results also show a partial support for the ‘fit’ perspective that reactive IT leaders that emphasize intensive deployment of IT innovation in dynamic environments are found to obtain a cost advantage in production and operation process over time. The findings offer practical implications for managers to better engage in IT innovations to create and sustain competitive advantage. Synthesizing options thinking and dynamic capability perspective, we provide a framework to better understand IT innovation, dynamic environment, and performance outcomes. The findings also shed useful light on whether, when, and how to innovate with IT for sustained competitive advantage.     

Leader delegation in global software teams: occurrence and effects

Global teams are an important work structure in software development projects. Managing such complex global software projects presents many challenges to traditional leadership wisdom, in particular, how, why and when the leaders should delegate responsibility and authority. Delegation is considered an important leadership component to motivate and grow subordinates. Cultural differences, skill level disparity and potential competition between different software development sites creates a management context which is much different from where traditional leadership theories were developed. This study investigates leader delegation behaviors in global software teams and explores the reasons and impact of delegation strategies on global team performance. Semi-structured interviews and a survey was used to collect data from global software team managers and members from four countries of a Fortune 100 IT service company. The results of this study include in-depth analysis of hows and whys of leader delegation in global teams and a theoretical model for analyzing global team leader delegation occurrence and effects.     

面向新浪微博的意见领袖挖掘算法

当前的影响力分析算法大多基于网络拓扑结构或用户交互信息,然而单一方面的方法会使挖掘结果出现较大的偏差,目前缺乏全面准确的影响力挖掘方法。本文通过对传统PageRank算法进行扩展,提出一种面向新浪微博的基于用户交互度连接属性的TCRank算法;其次设计了3种微博意见领袖特征指标,并对其加权求和用于意见领袖候选集的精化操作;同时提出一种基于卷积神经网络模型的情感支持度的意见领袖抽取算法,对意见领袖候选集进行最终排名。最后,通过实验验证所提出算法的有效性。