THE IMPACT OF SOME ORGANIZATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS ON INFORMATION SYSTEMS PLANNING SUCCESS

Abstract

Information system planning has gained considerable interest among both researchers and practitioners. Not only due to the amount of investments that firms have made in information systems but also due to information systems strategic role (premkumar & king, 1994). Information systems professionals feel pressure to think strategically about the role of information systems in the organizations, but often they have minimal concept of strategy and role information system can play in the organizational distinctiveness and competence. (Hatten & Hatten,!997) . Today, Strategic information systems planning has become an accepted part of the overall corporate strategic planning process (Rogerson & Fidler, 1994).

The integration of inputs from business planning into the IS planning process has been identified as being a potential major problem in IS planning (Lederer and Sethi,l992;1996; Lederer and Mendelow, 1993; Lederer and Salamela,l996). In some organizations, business strategies and plans exist only on the minds of a few senior managers and are not communicated to others, in other organizations these information inputs are provided primarily through business plan documents that are not sufficiently detailed to provide guidance for effective IS planning. Moreover, frequent changes in the business environment make a plan rapidly obsolete. This necessitate a facilitation mechanism to assure information system planning quality anc. effectiveness (Premkumar & King,l994). Although the plan might be effective but still implementation is poor , this is a generally agreed upon problem. Many authors revealed that there are many problems concerning implementation.

All these problems must be solved through creating an interaction or a link between various business units. Although information system methodologies have been used for many years, organizations are still failing to deal effectively with IS planning problems. This is mainly because many of such methodologies do not seem to realize that the IS planning related problems result not merely from technological problems, but are also derived from paying too little attention to the interrelationship between IS and business and organizational factors (Lederer and Sethi,l996; Lederer and Salmela, 1996).