Abstract The emerging electronic economy is bringing with it new forms of IT-enabled intermediation, virtual supply chains, rapidly changing electronic commerce technologies, increasing knowledge intensity, and unprecedented sensitivity for time-to-market by customers. Customers are demanding more value, customized to their exact needs, at less cost, and as quickly as possible. The enterprises that will survive in such a demanding environment will need to innovate and invent new ways of creating value, and will require different enterprise architectures and different IT infrastructures. This article focuses on providing a framework for guiding an enterprise as it transforms itself to function more effectively in the electronic economy. Using the distribution industry in general and Marshall Industries in particular as a context, the article draws insights for transforming an extended enterprise's architecture and its IT infrastructure to enable new ways of creating value in ...

Leadership in information systems (IS) and information technology (IT) has changed in fundamental ways over the past decade. While interest in the topic has increased in recent years, little empirical research on IS/IT leadership has been conducted. This study compares leadership roles, individual characteristics and position characteristics of newly appointed IS/IT executives (those who have been in their position for two years or less) with established IS/IT executives using a survey conducted in Norway. Survey results indicate that new leaders spend more time in the informational role and in the change-leader role than established leaders. New leaders have worked a shorter time in the organization and a shorter time in IS/IT than established leaders. New leaders have less responsibility for computer operations, communication networks and technical infrastructure than established leaders. Keywords: IS/IT leadership

The emerging electronic economy is bringing with it new forms of IT-enabled intermediation, 1Robert Zmud was the accepting senior editor for this paper. Also, an earlier version of this paper won first prize in the 1997 SIM Paper Competition. virtual supply chains, rapidly changing electronic commerce technologies, increasing knowledge intensity, and unprecedented sensitivity for time-to-market by customers. Customers are demanding more value, customized to their exact needs, at less cost, and as quickly as possible. The enterprises that will survive in such a demanding environment will need to innovate and invent new ways of creating value, and will require different enterprise architectures and different IT infrastructures. This article focuses on providing a framework for guiding an enterprise as it transforms itself to function more effectively in the electronic economy. Using the distribution industry in general and Marshall Industries in particular as a context, the article draws insights for transforming an extended enterprise’s architecture and its IT infrastructure to enable new ways. of creating value in the electronic economy. The article provides a staged junction box model for guiding the transformation and also articulates the elements of the new value logic for enterprises in the electronic economy.

This paper draws on the need to understand how mobile technology is implemented and used at the organisational level. IT is a general-purpose technology and therefore its use involves a high degree of uncertainty and ambiguity. Moreover, IT vendors and system developers tend to be very unambiguous in their rhetoric about mobile technology opportunities. Therefore, managers have trouble to identify the real scope, the functionality and the impact of new mobile applications. However, these three types of uncertainties need to be handled in change management projects where new information technology is involved. Gradual uncertainty reduction at these three different levels, i.e. what technology can do; will technology work; and will users adopt it, is studied in this paper. This is achieved through an analysis of the implementation process of an information system where mobile terminals are used to give service technicians access to the ERP system at BT Europe, a leading supplier of forklift trucks. The analysis shows how the three levels of uncertainty interact, and how the computerised parts of the information system are complemented by mindful intertwining with the non-computerised communication and manual data processing, in order for the information system to work.

This study uses the institutional theory as a lens for explaining choice of IT governance modes in organizations. Reasons are given to show how an IT governance mode can in itself be considered a legitimized institution. A conceptual framework is then developed, and several hypotheses are presented. The framework considers the IT governance modes from a non-rational perspective. It posits that coercive, normative, and mimetic pressures have an influence on the choice of IT governance modes.