Information Systems Planning: Contributions from Organizational Learning

The effective management of information services in the modern firm is a challenging task, to say the least. Most enterprises today are highly dependent on their ability to manage information technology. In many firms, the quality of the firm’s products or services depends on the strategic choices the firm has made with respect to its information services. The three key elements of an IT strategy are: the choice of what ITrelated products or services are required for the business, the determination of which of these products and services will require firm-specific capabilities, and the choice of governance and ownership for both firm specific and generic capabilities. These decisions intertwine and cannot be made in isolation or even in sequence. To complicate matters further, most firms find that their business strategies are in some part driven by what they can expect in terms of an IT strategy. For example, for a firm to adopt an e-commerce strategy, they must also insure that they can obtain the appropriate IT products and services, which these will be firm-specific as needed, and that they will have appropriate levels of ownership and control over the requisite products and services. Needless to say, many firms struggle to maintain a reasonable fit between their business and IT strategies. Some (but not all) of the responsibility for this difficult task falls to the information services unit and the chief information officer.