AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

When businesses invest in information technology (IT) they typically do so with the intention of driving a benefit for their various stakeholders. Generally, it has been argued that for IS to generate business value, IT investments need to be made strategically so as not to represent merely bandages to operational problems and inefficiencies and the resulting IS use has to be assessed for its effectiveness in addition to its efficiency (Brynjolfsson 1993). As a result, not only does the IS have to enable and to support the business goals and objectives (Oh and Pinsonneault 2007), but the IS has to be used (Orlikowski 2000) and used effectively (Marcolin et al. 2000). In light of these considerations, this thesis aims to deepen our understanding of two crucial elements driving the IT value proposition: the management of IS, more specifically how organizations achieve strategic alignment (Paper1), and the use of IS, both in an individual (Paper #2) and collective (Paper #3) context.Beyond studies related to the importance of strategic alignment between business strategy and IS strategy as well as establishing a number of enablers and inhibitors, there is a paucity of research on how organizations actually achieve strategic alignment. Paper #1 conceptualizes the process of achieving strategic alignment from a decision-making perspective by deductively drawing upon extant literature on strategic alignment and decision-making. Case study data collected from three research sites reveals that the structure of the decision-making process inherent in achieving strategic alignment is shaped by organizational and decisional factors. Research has shown that the IT value proposition is often dependent not only on how individual employees use technology, but how effective their use actually is. In this context, an individual's Degree of IT literacy has been highlighted as a critical skill in determining one's ability to use technology to achieve valuable attainments. Drawing from extant literature on IT literacy, self-efficacy, and IS use, Paper #2 develops a variance-based model that aims to explain and to predict Effective Use by taking into consideration an individual's Degree of IT literacy. Given a lack of a conceptualization and operationalization of IT literacy, this study addresses this gap by developing an objective measure of IT literacy. The analysis of survey data from 584 Mediawiki users reveals that Effective Use is positively related to Performance accomplishments and Emotional arousal. In addition, the Degree of IT literacy influences Effective Use not directly, as originally thought, but through a relationship fully mediated by the Degree of self-efficacy. This, in turn, suggests that the fit between an individual's Degree of IT literacy and one's Degree of self-efficacy helps shape Effective Use.As information systems (IS) have evolved from primarily stand-alone, to enterprise, and networked-level applications, the need for conceptual clarity vis-à-vis collective IS use has come to represent a research and…