Current Research Projects
The ISRC has a number of ongoing research projects. These projects include:
Developing an Organizational Benefits Management Capability: Closing the knowing-doing gap
Delivering and Managing Business Value from Information Technology
Innovation through Information Tecnology
The Future IS Organisation: Agile, Responsive and Proactive
Programme Management
Enterprise-Wide Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management
Impact of Outsourcing on the Social Capital of the Organisation
The Changing Role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO)
From Value Chain to Value Network: Analysing Competitive Spaces in the Digital Economy
Developing an Organisational Benefits Management Capability: Closing the knowing-doing gap'
Our research survey in 2006 showed there is a clear relationship between the extent to which organisations adopt ‘benefits management good practices’ and the success achieved in terms of benefits delivered. The diagnostic tool developed from that work helps organisations to identify and then focus attention on the practices that need to be improved to increase the benefits achieved.
To extend our knowledge of how good benefits management practices can be implemented successfully and in particular to understand how to address organisational issues that can inhibit or even prevent effective adoption, we are starting a new research programme this autumn. The work will help participating organisations improve the value realised from their IS/IT investments, by adopting proven good practices and then making them work effectively – the ‘knowing-doing gap’.
A number of organisations have agreed to take part in this research. If it is of interest to your organisation please download the research proposal.
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Delivering and Managing Business Value from Information Technology
Demonstrating business value at pre- and post investment as well as ensuring that expected benefits are realised, is a perennial problem for organisations in relation to their information technology (IT) spend. Building on the ISRC's pioneering work in "IT Benefits Management", "Managing IT-enabled Change", "Benefits Assurance" and "Programme Management", this project seeks to further extend knowledge and practice, particularly in preparing more relevant business cases and investment proposals as well as in measuring benefits and value and dealing with risk. It also seeks to develop additional tools and techniques, to complement those that have been deployed by many organisations in the benefits management process that has resulted from our research; in particular, to consider more fully the lag between implementation and benefits realisation, how benefits can be tracked, as well as the disruption to an organisation's social network caused by new IT systems.
Investments decisions are made in the context of meeting current requirements while not inhibiting future possibilities. While IT can be an inhibitor to strategic change and growth, the challenge is not to constrain future strategic options due to decisions that are made today. New approaches to investment appraisal, such as real options, offer potential opportunities to address this issue. There is also the impact of IT as a growing fixed cost to consider and the challenge of achieving the right balance between fixed and variable spend and investment and cost. How do organisations optimise between operational and capital expenditure? Value is often based on perception, yet how can this be factored into any process? How can business value be demonstrated to an often sceptical audience? Can we build an organisation model of IT value? How do we maximise the utilisation of IT assets, particularly legacy investments?
The first phase of this project commenced in July 2006 and will be completed in September 2007. The first part of the project was a major international survey of benefits management practices. The results of this survey are now available.
Download Executive Summary of Delivering Value Report
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Innovation through Information Technology
How does an organization marry the capabilities of new and emerging technologies with business opportunities? How do organizations identify opportunities to deploy new technologies in ways that fundamentally transform not just 'what they do' but 'how they do it'? How can this innovative capability become embedded in the very fabric of an organization? What resources, structures, processes, routines and practices define and shape this capability? How do organizations make sense of new and emerging technologies? These questions capture the essence of a quest that scholars and practitioners have struggled with, ever since IT was first deployed in organizations.
Innovating through information systems and technology is intrinsically about identifying and exploiting opportunities to create new products/services, work practices and processes, enter new markets, create new business models, transform business relationships or expand the scope of the business. This innovative activity can also see IT shaping competitive strategy; the innovative use of IT can be a key differentiator that contributes to business success. IT, as an exogenous force, can additionally have a disruptive impact on industries and to survive, organizations must have the capacity to sense and respond to such shocks.
IT has been deployed in both public and private sector organizations for over fifty years now. While there are a multitude of examples of IT being deployed by organizations to provide them with a superior competitive position, in the majority of cases these are one-off instances with these case organizations unable to sustain this innovative capability. Indeed, a study of the classic cases in the application of IT for competitive advantage revealed that these organizations were unable to sustain the innovative capability that they had seemingly exhibited. It would seem, therefore, that many innovative deployments of IT are the result of serendipity or luck rather than any formal innovation process. Although strategic information systems planning (SISP) also has an objective of seeking opportunities to innovatively deploy IT, it focuses more on aligning IT investments with current strategic trusts and achieving business objectives rather than with transforming the strategy itself.
IT innovation is a new emerging discipline, which exists at the intersection of both information technology and innovation. While both information technology and innovation are immature, it appears that their intersection and synthesis in a new cross-discipline of IT innovation can add significant value in a world where information technology is becoming pervasive.
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The Future IS Organisation: Agile, Responsive and Proactive
The environment within which the IS organisation operates is in a constant flux. New strategies, reflecting business opportunities and changing market conditions, are developed to remain competitive. Organisational structures, processes and work practices continually evolve, reflecting the new strategic requirements. The implementation of technologies, such as the Internet, service oriented architectures (SOA), utility computing and mobile networks raise management issues not encountered with older technologies. The increased use of outsourcing - both IT and business process - has also changed the environment within which the IS organisation must operate. Seeking agility in both supply and demand chains places additional pressures on the IS organisation. Couple this with the increasing prevalence of mobile working, home working and the extension of IT systems into both supplier and customer organisations raises additional issues. No organisation can hope to manage in this context with an IS organisation that is designed and managed based on principles and practices developed in a previous era. The IS organisation must change and evolve to reflect these changing conditions and new requirements. The future IS organisation must be agile, responsive and proactive. But what will it look like?
This project will explore new models for the IS organisation to reflect ever changing conditions. It will develop new blueprints for structures and processes. In addition, it will address questions such as: What capabilities must the new IS organisation develop? What is the right balance between centralisation and decentralisation? How can an appropriate governance structure be established? What are the criteria used to assess the agility and responsiveness of an IS organisation? How can an IS organisation respond to as well as drive change? What does "lean" mean in the context of the IS organisation? What do organisations' have to do to make any transition?
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Programme Management
The next phase of our research into programme management is currently being planned. We are now working on a research design that will enable us to develop a comprehensive diagnostic tool to help organisations, sponsors and programme managers/directors. The tool will be applied to programmes to gauge the extent to which appropriate support structures and processes are present at both programme and project levels. The project will build on the four completed stages of our research to date, namely (1) the competence of individual programme managers, (2) actual programme management practices, (3) organisational features that support or hinder low-level and high-level thinking, and (4) our more recent work exploring reasons for the success or failure of specific programmes.
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Enterprise-Wide Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management
In recent years, business intelligence (BI) - the use of data analysis tools to support business decision makers - has been undergoing a fundamental change. Once the preserve of business analysts, statisticians and other information specialists, there is increasing demand for this analytical power to be made directly accessible to managers and many other employees who do not have specialist analytical skills. The technical challenges are being overcome through increasingly powerful hardware and innovations in IT and information architectures, but the organisational implications are not well understood.
The proposed research will investigate the challenges of using business intelligence systems on an enterprise-wide scale. Topical issues that could be included within the study include:
- the challenge of enabling non-specialists to obtain fit-for-purpose information and interpret it appropriately when making decisions;
- the need for collaboration between IS and analytical specialists to provide analytical support for a growing range of strategic, operational and domain-specific decision makers who use BI tools;
- the organisational aspects of standardising data across the enterprise to enable consistent reporting and performance measurement; and
- the business and culture change implications of using BI systems to monitor and manage performance at different levels from corporate strategy to day-to-day supervision of operations.
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Impact of Outsourcing on the Social Capital of the Organisation
The outsourcing of IT applications, services and infrastructure has become a popular strategy. Yet experience with outsourcing has been mixed, with many organisations clearly disappointed with the returns that they have achieved. Indeed, some have taken the decision to backsource, and bring back in-house what they had previously outsourced. On occasions, this decision has occurred just a few short months into a multi-year contract and at considerable cost.
This research project is using the notion of social capital as the lens to explore outsourcing relationships. Social capital can be seen as the network of personal relationships that exists in an organisation. (For more information see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital). The concept can be used to explore relationships that exist in an organisation in the delivery of business value through IT. The study’s hypothesis is that outsourcing disrupts this social capital and consequently impacts the performance of the outsourcing arrangements. The implications for practice will be developed. This research is being undertaken in association with ISEG, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, Portugal.
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The Changing Role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO): The Nature of IT Leadership to Drive Business Performance
The IT Leadership Programme is an innovative executive education programme that has recently been launched by Cranfield School of Management. To ensure that the scope and content of this programme is relevant and at the leading edge of practice, research continues into the nature of leadership required to drive business performance through IT. This research project is been undertaken in conjunction with the Centre for Executive Learning.
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From Value Chain to Value Network: Analysing Competitive Spaces in the Digital Economy
The concept of the "value chain" has assumed a dominant position in the strategic analysis of industries, popularised by the research and writings of Harvard Business School economist Professor Michael Porter. It has proved a very useful mechanism for portraying the chained linkage of activities that exist in the physical world within traditional industries, particularly manufacturing. Furthermore, it has framed our thinking about value and value creation. However, the value chain is underpinned by a particular value creating logic and its application results in firms adopting particular strategic postures. Indeed, in deploying the value chain, an assumption is made as to what an industry is and how it should be defined.
As products and services become dematerialised and the value chain itself no longer having a physical dimension, the value chain concept becomes an inappropriate device with which to analyse many industries. This is particularly evident in sectors such as banking, insurance, telecommunications, news, entertainment, music, advertising, and certain areas of the public sector.
Adopting a network perspective provides an alternative perspective that is more suited to New Economy organisations, particularly for those where both the product/service and supply and demand chains are digitized. Additionally, many industries now exhibit strong cooperative behaviour with inter-firm relationships playing a significant role in strategic performances. This research is working with the concept of the value network, suggesting it as a more appropriate device to analyse competitive ecosystems. Importantly, the value network has its own value creating logic that is more relevant to firms operating in a digital economy. An initial approach, called Network Value Analysis (NVA), has been developed and is being tested and further enhanced during the research process. The application of NVA is being explored in different "industries" to identified potential strategic implications.
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