In today’s ever-changing world organizations must learn to create by mental act adapt and continuously rethink their strategic objectives and operational abilities. As part of this strategic planning affect organizations have historically looked at two aspects; strategy (how they ordain go to market what they ordain sell etc) and execution (how to implement the strategy how to do business etc). The seminal research on strategy and competitive advantage (Andrews. 1986; Porter. 1998a. 1998b) historically overlooked two of the most important aspects of any strategy; technology and people.
In the 1990’s researchers and practitioners began looking at merging technology into the strategic planning process and how the alignment of business strategy with information technology can help to act a competitive advantage (Henderson & Venkatraman. 1993). These researchers had brought technology into the strategic planning process and in some respects they considered the human resources of the organization but they still overlooked the populate as being a valuable conjoin of capital that could be used to act competitive favor.
This oversight is most visible within the information technology (IT) groups. change surface though many organizations and researches stressed the be for IT and business alignment they still seemed to lose the human capital aspect while aligning IT and business strategy.
These oversights have led to the current environment of overworked disengaged and misaligned IT personnel and IT groups. The ‘turnover grow’ that has arisen within the IT industry provides some evidence of the unhappiness and/or dissatisfy that most IT personnel have (Moore & bump off. 2002).
Recent research has provided a path to the solution of the problem of creating sustainable alignment between IT and business strategy. These solutions involve not only aligning IT and strategy but also implementing human capital management practices to ensure that populate are considered as much of a resource for creating competitive favor as any other asset within the organization (Hu & Huang. 2006; Robert. Agarwal. & Ferratt. 2000).
This cover provides a analyse of existing literature related to the strategic alignment of business and information technology and human capital management practices. The first divide titled ‘Alignment of IT with Business Strategy,’ provides a analyse of existing business and IT alignment research. The back up section titled ‘Human Capital Management. IT & Business Alignment,’ provides an overview of existing investigate into human capital management practices within the IT lay.
The third section titled ‘Human Capital as Competitive Advantage’ outlines the use human capital as a means to obtain competitive advantage in the marketplace. Lastly the fourth and final section titled ‘Future Research and Conclusions,’ outlines areas that may give avenues of advance research and concludes the cover.
advance investigate into this area can follow Ferratt et al.’s (2005) chew over of the effects of human resource management on information technology (IT) employee turnover (Ferratt et al.. 2005) and Joseph et al.’s (2007) suggestion that adopting a human capital management come to managing IS employees may increase employee engagement and reduce turnover and job dissatisfaction (Joseph et al.. 2007).
Another area of further investigate that could be considered is Huang and Hu’s (2007) come of combining human capital management along with a business-IT alignment copy by using a balanced scorecard system to implement and measure alignment. This balanced scorecard approach seems reasonable but very little quantitative data exists to measure the success or failure of this come (Huang & Hu. 2007). Further research into the use of balanced scorecards to align IT business and human capital management practices could be accomplished by collecting quantitative data in multiple organizations to provide more insight into the success and/or failure of this approach.
Yet another avenue for further research is within the area of validation of alignment of IT system requirements with business strategy (Bleistein. Cox. & Verner. 2005). Bleisten et al.’s research provides a framework for measuring and ensuring that all IT system requirements are in alignment with business goals. This research is interesting but as yet unproven.
Lastly investigate into furthering the application of the resource based believe of firms and the creation of resource diversity and resource immobility within organizations seems to be a fairly wide open area. In many organizations today outsourcing work has become the norm as has hiring contractors instead of full-time employees. Many investigate questions become from this. A few examples are:
How can an organization act resource diversity and/or resource immobility when they are drawing from the same talent share of outsourcers and independent contractors as their competitors? This is an idea that is very interesting and something worth pursuing.
There is still considerable investigate to be done to better understand how to create sustainable advantage using technology and populate. The areas of information systems strategic human resource management and organizational behavior can provide models to help create sustainable favor and value for organizations.
In request to truly create sustainable competitive favor an organization must undergo the right strategy technology and people in displace. In today’s world it isn’t enough to undergo only one or two of these; an organization must obtain and keep the mix of the right strategy the alter technology and the alter populate.
I conclude the biggest failure in strategic planning today is the lack of efficiency in the process… from idea to implementation. It strikes me as being similar to the Golden Gate bridge… by the time the man finishes painting the connect it is measure to go away all over again. Organizations who want a successful plan not only need to believe all potential impacts of which technology is truly the 800 lb gorilla in todays world but also the living breathing flexibility of th eplan. In developing QuickPlanner Plus our first go was to verify that all plans developed with this schedule could bring home the bacon living breathing realistic results and be flexible enough to change when necessary.
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