Fernando Paulo Belfo

Influence of Incentive Policy in Strategic Alignment of Information Technology and Business

The strategic alignment of IS/IT and business is complex and dynamic in its nature. Independently of other affecting factors, author pretends to explore the importance of behavior aspects within IT practitioners’ activity, so he reviews three important behavior theories and relate them within this context. The introduction of an incentive policy encourages not only the work efficiency of each employee, their satisfaction and performance of their work, but also the psychological and organizational behavior. Author underlines the importance of defining a global incentive’s policy taking into account the achievement of a higher strategic alignment. The organizational incentive policy should take into consideration individual objectives, including all aspects valued by employees in their working relationships as payment, benefits, career and work environment. A strategic alignment model between IT and business is proposed based on the definition of an incentive policy.

Reviewing Business-IT Alignment Instruments Under SAM Dimensions

Business-IT alignment has been on the top of the concerns of IT executives for many years and how to assess it has been under research. Among many proposals, one of the best known and cited in the literature, showing some relevant empirical work, is the Luftmans Strategic Alignment Maturity SAM categories assessment. Taking it as a framework, seven other proposals are examined using SAM categories as dimensions of business-IT alignment: communications, competency/value measurements, governance, partnership, technology scope and skills. Except for one proposal revealing a tactical level approach, this review shows that business-IT alignment assessment has been studied essentially at the strategic level. Among the examined dimensions across the several proposals, governance is the best covered one while the human resource skills dimension is considerably neglected. Having still room for improvements, either in the governance or the technology scope dimensions, the SAM assessment seems a well balanced instrument. The empirical work already found on SAM provides a good starting point to get an acceptable validated instrument. However, if in terms of content validity, SAM is one of the most promising instruments, there is still much work to do on what concerns its operationalization. Future research should strive for a rigorous, strong instrument on every component of construct validity, namely, the convergent, discriminant and nomological components.

Developing an Instrument to Assess Information Technology Staff Motivation

Motivation is a key factor that influences individual effort, which, in turn, affects individual and organizational performance. Nevertheless, motivation at work depends on the organizational rewards and incentives, according to individual goals. This paper reports on the development of an instrument designed to measure the motivation of Information Technology people at their workplace. Psychology theories and work addressing intrinsic and extrinsic motivation have been studied. Some motivation instruments were reviewed and analyzed. Specificities and special characteristics regarding IT workers were evidenced and combined with other more general motivation factors. The instrument has been developed according to the five dimensions of the Worldatwork framework, resulting in a set of 30 scale items addressing 23 variables. Besides measuring the IT motivation levels, the tool may also help any organization to understand the weaknesses and strengths regarding incentive policies, and therefore, assist on the definition of new ones.

Strategic Alignment through Organizational Modeling: A Case Study in a Public Institution

The results-oriented management, performance evaluation systems and operations alignment entails the creation of a new organizational environment with novel management practices. This paper addresses organizational strategic alignment issues and offers a modeling technique as a possible solution. A case study of Information Technology alignment in a public organization was developed to test and validate the technique. The study uses a methodology to link the information systems with organizational objectives. The modeling technique proposed by this methodology can be used by managers to formulate, communicate and align the strategy with operations execution. Thus, the methodology applied in this case study can assume a central role in the transformation process of public organizations trying to achieve efficiency and providing quality services to the citizens and society. Finally, this paper presents a new alignment management practice based on organizational engineering.