The Generated Business Value from IT: the Case of Fostering Organizational Innovation
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Date
2010-12
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Publisher
The British University in Dubai (BUiD)
Abstract
The difficult situations that emerged during the economic downturn over the recent years put an increasing pressure on executives to create more value from IT, as a significant amount of money is being allocated to IT. This was a plausible reason for shifting IT from a supporting function that facilitates business work and automates it to a fundamental player in driving business development and growth. This dissertation is undertaken to study how organizations can maximize the return value from their investment in IT, and what are the significant benefits that organizations can obtain from IT to make their business grow. Then the dissertation focuses into one business benefit which is fostering organizational innovation. Accordingly, this study aims to examine the role of IT-based knowledge management systems in triggering and supporting business innovation, in addition, it aims examining the role of enterprise management information systems in developing innovative business practices. Research for this study included a review of current literature on the returned business value from investing in IT capabilities, as well as reviewing the literature in organizational innovation and its practices. The research also included five case studies each done by interviewing number of senior IT staff, working at these cases. The major findings revealed that there were indeed number of knowledge management practices that used and helped organizations in triggering and supporting business innovations, as well the enterprise information systems had the ability to introduce innovative business practices like innovative processes. The conclusion suggests that there were significant business benefits that could be generated from investing in IT, including fostering organizational innovation, but there was an inadequate exploitation for some of these benefits. Therefore, the study recommends exploiting the benefits by more integrative work across-functional business units and to use the latest advances in IT to communicate and collaborate to diffuse the knowledge that can be applied in business innovations.
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DISSERTATION WITH DISTINCTION
Keywords
organizational innovation, enterprise information systems, knowledge management, business development