Strategic information systems planning: A case study from the financial services industry

Strategic Information Systems Planning (SISP) is an important topic for managers and researchers alike. However, there is evidence of a gap between SISP research and practice. Taking this situation as a motivation, we conducted an in depth case study on SISP to investigate this gap. The study was carried out in a German financial services company (FSC) over a period of five months in summer 2003. During this time, the enterprise situation and the information system (IS) practices situation of FSC were studied with respect to the SISP approach in place. Our findings confirm the hypothesis that practitioners largely ignore academic literature and do not use it in support of their SISP endeavours. This is all the more striking since FSC extensively used guidance from IS research in other fields such as systems analysis and software development. Our case study examines in detail two possible explanations for the gap: firstly a lacking transfer of academic knowledge to practice, and secondly deficiencies in the academic knowledge base itself. In fact, our observations highlight a disconnect between academic discussion and practical conduct. However, we found that the ignorance of academic literature on SISP is not primarily caused by a constrained knowledge transfer. In order to exclude communication barriers, we filtered the academic discussion according to the specific situation and the needs of FSC and translated it into practical recommendations. Nevertheless, the academic arguments we put forward hardly had any impact, either on IT managers' thinking or on SISP practice at FSC. Though academic literature was partly perceived as inspiring, it was not regarded as a touchstone for SISP practice. Academia, in the eyes of FSC's practitioners, ignores the ''real problems'' and thus is not accredited as a relevant source of advice. Moreover, in a final discussion with FSC's senior IT executives we got the impression that the professional identity of FSC's IT management - and more specifically the CIO's role - was different from interpretations prevalent in academia. The academic discussion assumes the CIO to be an initiator of organisational innovations and driver of business strategy on the board. In contrast, we found that FSC's CIO basically perceives her role as that of a service provider to business. While the different perceptions might be due to idiosyncrasies of FSC, related research provided additional empirical support for the conjecture of misleading academic assumptions about the role of IT management in practice.