A Contingent Study of Information System Planning

정보시스템 계획의 상황적인 연구

Recently, the importance of ISP(Information System Planning) has been increased because of rapid change and severe competition in business environments. Furthermore, the role of IS in the organization has included not only the supportive activities but also the strategic activities. Organizations can get the competitive advantages through the strategic use of IT by establishing effective and systematic ISP implementation. The main focus of this study is investigate the relationship among three subunits(organizational factors, the role of IS and effective ISP) based on the contingent settings which the process of ISP is implemented. The reasons that conceptual framework of this study is based on the contingent theory are as follow: First, ISP process itself has a series of complicated work which various elements in a company are involved. ISP externally must have the process to evaluate information technology (technology related with IS). Internally ISP process has a serious of works including determining information requirements to develop successful IS for other functional departments and identifying strategic opportunity of IS aligned with business strategy. Secondly, the activity of ISP is occurring on the continual basis. Business environments in which ISP process has implemented are changing continuously. Specific ISP methodology which was appropriate in a certain period of time does not work any more because of the rapid changes in business environments. For this reason managers can hardly expect successful ISP without considering external environments or internal environments such as organizational or management side. For this study, 240 survey questionnaires were mailed and 71 questionnaires were returned. 57 samples were used for the final analysis and 14 samples were excluded from analysis in that they didn't exercise official and systematic ISP. As the result of analysis, among the internal factors(organizational size, time frame of decision making, budget, management style, organizational culture) organizational culture, management style and time frame of decision making are identified as contingent factors on the effective ISP. The result of this study may have meaning in suggesting the way to develop effective ISP through the formalization of business process, more favorable users attitude toward IS and selection of an appropriate ISP methodology.