Pushing for the Firm’s IT Orientation: Role of IT Managers in Enhancing the
Firm’s Business Performance

Lee W. Lee
Raghu V. Kowshik

Abstract

Although information technology (IT) plays a critical role in running an organization today, it is still considered by senior executives as a secondary support function and often is pushed aside in the executive group. To a large extent, such subservient position in an organization is attributed by their own posture of IT managers, who narrowly focus their role and activities in their organization on solely handling technology problems and passively resting on their mere solutions. Upon close examination of a few proactive technology managers who actively promote an enhanced role of information technology in the contemporary aggressively innovative organization, we propose in this thesis that the IT managers should actively promote the organization’s IT orientation in order to gain power and influence in the organization and that the enhanced IT orientation enhance the business performance. We also propose that the IT managers’ power and influence in an organization should increase as they increase their accountability for the performance, innovativeness of the company’s products and processes, customer connectivity, and facilitating inter-department collaboration. We will elaborate on theoretical foundation of these claims and discuss on further studies and practical implications.

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