MIS Distinguished Speaker Series

Managing Collective Enterprise Information Systems Compliance – A Social and Performance Management Context Perspective

Yulin Fang

Professor
Department of Information Systems
College of Business
City University of Hong Kong

Friday, Oct 16

9:30 – 10:30 am | Zoom

Abstact:

In today’s environment characterized by business dynamism and information technology (IT) advances, firms must frequently update their enterprise information systems (EIS) and their use policies to support changing business operations. In this context, users are challenged to maintain EIS compliance behavior by continuously learning new ways of using EIS. Furthermore, it is imperative to business that employees of a functional unit maintain EIS compliance behavior collectively, due to the interdependent nature of tasks that the unit needs to accomplish through EIS. However, it is particularly challenging to achieve such a collective level of EIS compliance, due to the difficulty that these employees may encounter in quickly learning updated EIS. It is therefore vital for firms to establish effective managerial principles to ensure collective EIS compliance of a functional unit in a dynamic environment. To address this challenge, this study develops a research model to explain collective EIS compliance by integrating the IS-novel organizational literature on social context and performance management context with social capital theory. It proposes that social context, an organizational environment characterized by trust and support, positively affects collective EIS compliance by developing business-IT social capital that enhances mutual learning between business and IT personnel. Furthermore, the performance management context, an organizational environment characterized by discipline and “stretch” is seen to have a direct and beneficial effect on collective EIS compliance as well as an indirect, moderating effect on the causal chain among social contexts, business-IT social capital, and collective EIS compliance. General empirical support for this research model is provided via a multiple-sourced survey of managers and employees of 159 functional units of 53 firms that use EIS, as well as their corresponding IT unit managers. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed

Anjana Susarla

Assistant Professor,
Tepper School of Business,
Carnegie Mellon University

February 16, 2011

Speakman Hall 200, 1000am – 1130am

Seminar Title : Social Capital, Reputation and Contract Design in Buyer-Supplier Networks

Abstract

Prior research on inter-firm contracting has identified the ideal governance mode to be either Formal‟ or „Relational‟ governance modes. However, both streams of literature rely on stringent assumptions about the cost of breaching contractual obligations and the mechanism of enforcement. We propose an embeddedness-based governance logic by examining an inter-organizational network of exchange partners. The buyer-seller network acts as a conduit for market actors to exchange information about exchange opportunities as well as the actual services traded, providing a mechanism for community enforcement. A firm‟s social capital in the network could assuage concerns about opportunism whereby a firm can maintain a reputation for performance. A firm‟s position in the network also acts as a signal of its ability and quality to agents beyond the dyad. We analyze a large dataset of public information technology (IT) outsourcing announcements using multi-way cluster-robust and network auto-regression techniques. We examine the impact of firms‟ position in the inter-organizational network on an important contract design element, the duration of contracts. We find that a network position whereby a firm is associated with central trading partners is likely to predict longer contract duration. We find that this relationship holds even after controlling for a number of alternate causal explanations. Implications for practitioners and research are discussed.

For a copy of the paper, click here.