Towards the integration of e-business, knowledge management and policy considerations within an information systems strategy framework

In the previous edition of theJournal of Strategic Information Systems I promised to produce in this Editorial an outline framework for the incorporation of electronic commerce/networking and knowledge management within information systems strategy. I did so, given my concern that there is a tendency for these topics to be considered as relatively isolated phenomena in the literature currently (Galliers, 1999). The outline framework which appears later in this article as Fig. 2 is an extension of an earlier framework (Galliers, 1991) which owes much to the work of Earl (Earl, 1989). The earlier model appears as Fig. 1 below. Earl’s (1989) insightful contribution was to demarcate ‘the what’ and ‘the how’ of Information Systems Strategy. In doing so he clarified for us that the Information Systems Strategy is very much a business management issue, while the IT strategy lies for the most part within the domain of the IT function. The latter is concerned with alternative technological solutions (alternative ‘hows’) to support ‘the what’ of business needs, thereby enabling IT to be better aligned with the business strategy. In addition, he reminded us that alternative organizational arrangements for the IT function needed to be aligned with both the needs of the business and the chosen technological infrastructure. My amendment (Galliers, 1991) to Earl’s earlier work was to suggest that the information strategy might also usefully identify information that could questionthe taken-for-granted assumptions on which the business strategy was based (i.e. as well as providing information to enable the business strategy to be implemented)—’the why’ in other words. In addition, I stressed the need for an implementation/change management strategy as an integral part of the overall Information Systems Strategy, and for on-going evaluation and review. The latter would provide feedback as to the impact of past strategic decisions (as against expec ed outcomes) and the identification of emergent strategies (i.e. those that might ‘bubble up’ as a result of what Ciborra (1994) calls ‘tinkering’ and ‘bricolage’). With the advent of inter-organizational systems, and e-commerce in particular, it is Journal of Strategic Information Systems 8 (1999) 229–234