A literature overview on strategic information systems planning

Abstract

Strategic Information Systems Planning (SISP) has been among the highest ranked issues on management agendas for many years. As such, SISP should be a major concern for researchers as well. However, SISP does not play that important of a role in the academic discussion, at least in Germany. Leading German textbooks on Information Management devote only small sections to strategy themes. Moreover, the recommendations given for conducting SISP in these textbooks are mainly normative and hardly take international research findings into account. Taking this as a motivation, we conducted a comprehensive literature review of German and Anglo-American information systems journals. Our objective was to understand more fully what we know about SISP through international research. On the flip side, our research aims at identifying fields that are in urgent need for closer academic investigation so that individual speculations and normative recommendations might still substitute for valid research insights. Overall, we found a considerable amount of research conducted in the field of SISP that we organised in five broad thematic fields: Strategic IT impact, approaches to SISP, information systems strategy, and strategic alignment. We give a short overview of research conducted so far and seminal publications available in the research fields. Moreover, based on a sub-sample of our literature base, we compute statistics which indicate the intensity of the academic discussion in the different thematic fields over time. Our statistics show that most attention has been paid to the competitive use of IT. The IS strategy in contrast has only been of limited interest, though it is central to any strategic considerations in IS. Our survey also suggests that German speaking researchers have devoted relatively few efforts to SISP in comparison to their Anglo- American colleagues.

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