IMPORTANT NOTICE:
THIS ARTICLE IS AN EXTRACT OF LINES FROM A REPORT SUBMITTED BY MUKESH PARTHASARATHY TO UNITEC NEW ZEALAND. PLAGIARISM IS A SEVERE OFFENCE. KINDLY USE CITATIONS IF YOU ARE REFERRING TO THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR PAPERS OR WEBSITES.
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Posting 1:
What is the article?
The article is: The impact of Incremental Strategic Planning Information Systems Planning in an Uncertain Environment.
Who are the authors?
The authors of the article are Henry E. Newkirk from East Carolina University and Albert L. Lederer from University of Kentucky.
What is the source?
The source of the article is the Proceedings of the Tenth Americas Conference on Information Systems, New York, August 2004 as retrieved from the Internet from the website:
http://aisel.isworld.org/pdf.asp?Vpath=AMCIS/2004&PDFpath=SIGLED02-1133.pdf
on 21st August 2006.
Why this article was selected and what makes it appropriate?
First, the article is the proceedings of a very prestigious conference and the article has been published during August 2004, which is exactly 2 years back. And the article has co-authored by Albert L. Lederer who is a leading expert in this field. The article is about Incremental SISP in an uncertain environment and the approach to this very complex task by the authors has been statistical, probabilistic, and quantitative but not theoretical which is what makes this article very special. The article is also very appropriate with regards to today’s volatile landscape, namely, IT and IT driven sectors, that is constantly in need of good SISP.
My response to this article – initial thoughts and feelings, observations, rhetorical questions
A first look at the abstract of this article tells the three measuring factors for what the writers call as an uncertain environment and what the four factors are for measuring planning success.
The three factors for measuring an uncertain environment are:
•Dynamism
•Heterogeneity
•Hostility
The four factors for measuring planning success are:
•Alignment
•Analysis
•Cooperation
•Capability
A pilot test with five IS executives preceded the field survey of 1200 IS executives. The writers have made justifications for using these factors as measuring tools by providing appropriate citations but they could have also tried to probe into any other unknown factor that has influence. Or they could have provided some element of justification for not taking into consideration the ‘X’ factor. After all an uncertain environment cannot be defined or determined by certain/constant factors!
In fact they have mentioned in their article that Teo and King (1997) say that these three factors failed to find support for the hypothesis that they were positively associated with the integration of IS and business planning. Hence it is a great revelation from this experiment that one of the factors, namely, Dynamism moderated the impact of incremental SISP on SISP success whereas Heterogeneity and Hostility did not.
The finding is significant because as cited in the article, Sabherwal and King (1992) did find dynamism negatively associated with analysis during the decision making process preceding strategic IS applications, heterogeneity positively associated with analysis during the process, and hostility positively associated with politics during it; they concluded that dynamism pressures executives to decide during planning quickly whereas the other two do not.
Three hypotheses are provided by the writers, namely H1, H2, and H3.
H1: As the environment becomes more dynamic, more incremental planning predicts greater SISP success.
H2: As the environment becomes more heterogeneous, more incremental planning predicts greater SISP success.
H3: As the environment becomes more hostile, more incremental planning predicts greater SISP success.
All the three hypotheses were tested using moderator regression analysis.
Here are the factors that determined the different variables in this experiment.
Number of factors determining dynamism = 4
Number of factors determining heterogeneity = 3
Number of factors determining hostility = 5
Number of factors determining alignment = 8
Number of factors determining analysis = 8
Number of factors determining cooperation = 7
Number of factors determining capability = 7
The writers have not mentioned what are these factors that measured these variables; nor have they provided any citation support for the same.
In case of H1, initially, as planning became more incremental, success was decreasing. At this stage as dynamism was slowly increased, this changed the trend and started producing greater planning success. This is true in practice as when there is rapid change in the environment the IS priorities changes.
H2 and H3 have not been supported in this experiment. This is justified in practice as the factors heterogeneity and hostility as largely “external” to the domain in which the planning scope operates.
Relating this to my personal and professional experience/understandings of the topic
Having done a little bit of statistics previously, I feel the data for statistical tests like chi-square testing must be validated first. The writers of the article do provide citations to assume certain values. They seem to consider only values that are “statistically significant”. They have also provided citations to support their act of dropping certain factors like AL1 and AL2 of Alignment and AN2 and AN5 of Analysis. Perhaps if they could include these factors in this experiment, then we could have different results for H1, H2, and H3.
Conclusions (outline some further issues to explore-again pose a series of rhetorical questions- in other words what remains unanswered for you?)
This article throws up a variety of questions and issues. Can H2 and H3 be proved true in the future? If this can be proved true through research and can be applied in practice then heterogeneity and hostility can be moderated through incremental planning. Perhaps there are different unknown factors that affect heterogeneity and hostility. Further research can try to find out what these hidden factors are. Perhaps researchers may stumble upon the ‘X’ factor as the writer calls it. The statistical tools that have been adopted can be re-considered as well. May be the sample size of the experiment can be increased from 1200 to 6000. Also the response to the sample was not all that positive with only a total of 220 executives returning the survey for a response rate of 18%. These factors also affect the hierarchical moderator regression analysis. Next is the question of implementation of incremental planning in case of H1. Can the top executives allocate more money on their budget for implementing incremental planning in increasingly dynamic situations? Is it feasible? Should a feasibility study be made? Or are there risks involved?
