Impact of Information Systems on the Performance from an Alignment Approach: Conceptual Research Model

Abstract

Numerous works of research were carried on study of investments impact in information technologies (IT), concerning enterprises performance. The most interesting results suggest that it is not the importance of the investments in IT themselves who have a real impact on the performance but rather their adequation with the strategy and the firm structure. The works of Iivari (1992) and Henderson and Venkatraman (1993) have opened the way to several researches allowing to determine the impact of IT on the performance of firms by using the approaches based on the contingencies models in strategic management and in the organization theory. Those searchers suggest that the development of firm strategy and its information system must be coherent. They base on the notion of strategic alignment.

In that perspective, that research proposes to try answering at the managerial concern on studying the training process of the firm performance linked to establishment of information systems (IS). More precisely, it concerns the fact of analyzing the links and the mechanisms of influence of explanatory variables of the firm performance linked to IS. By that fact, we adopt the contingency perspective to study the link between, at the one hand, the alignment of IS at strategic level (coherence on strategic choices), organizational level (coherence into organization conception) and technological level (coherence into use of technologies), in the other hand, the firm performance linked to IS. It occurs then to observe the links existing between the alignment dimensions to better understand the mechanisms of performance training and that by a proposal of a conceptual framework in the goal of supplying a theorical solid built to conduct empirical investigation works.