A survey was conducted of 157 Canadian Information Systems (IS) personnel in organizations throughout Canada using a modified Delphi technique and follow-up interviews to identify the perceived critical issues in IS during the following 5 years. The important issues included: (1) building a responsive IT infrastructure; (2) improving IS project management practices and (3) planning and managing communication networks. Significant differences in the rating of the importance of these issues were reported between IS executives and non-management IS personnel. Qualitative data collected in 35 follow-up interviews provided some interesting insights into the rationale behind the ratings. The top 10 issues were compared to rankings previously reported in Canada and to data collected internationally in a comparable time period. The trend in Canada has been towards technological issues. From a global perspective, Canada currently appears to lead in management issues and lag in technological issues.
During the past 20 years, the business environment and the technology embedded within it has seen tremendous change. Information technology (IT) has grown by many orders of magnitude in capacity and speed and the importance of information as a corporate resource has increased dramatically. Personal productivity and decision-making tools are now accessible to enhance most business functions. New technologies on the horizon promise to enhance the richness of electronic communications and automate the development of even more systems.
This increased capability of IT coincides with changes in the business environment, including mergers, leveraged buyouts, downsizing, strategic alliances, globalization and commitment to total quality management and empowerment. In the 1990s, aligning Information Systems (IS) with the enterprise and managing processes appeared to by the theme [3]. These environmental changes presented demands on personnel at all levels of IS departments; these included the provision of timely, high-quality information and support of innovative products, production techniques and organizational designs. IS executives are particularly challenged, because they operate at the intersection of IT and the organization. In the face of rapid change, IS executives must be able to interpret trends in IT and assess the impacts on their organization while managing day-to-day operations.
Issues associated with IS management have regularly been investigated in the United States. These studies report a changing focus from largely technological issues in the earlier studies [1], [7] and [9] to a greater focus on management of technology [14] and technology infrastructure issues [2]. Similar investigations have been conducted in other countries, e.g. Australia [19], China [16] and [17], Hong Kong [12], Germany [11], Slovenia [4] and Taiwan [20].
Global firms can no longer afford to view there is function within the context of national and regional boundaries. IS issues appear to depend on the political, legal, economic, cultural and technological environments that exist in the foreign country under study [5]. The scope of our study expands on that of prior studies in two ways. First, we compare Canadian issues to those previously reported. Canada has a unique set of circumstances when compared to other countries; a very large geographical size (with correspondingly small population), different political structure, distinct regulation of telecommunications, disparate trade agreements, and a distinct culture. Second, very little work has been done to examine whether a shared vision of critical IS issues exists at different levels of the organization. Previous researchers admit that their survey results cannot be claimed as representative of the IS population in general as their data collection was usually limited to IS executives. We continue the move toward collecting data at various levels of IS personnel to examine whether the ‘vision’ of top IS executives is correlated to the perspectives of IS professionals at other organizational levels.
Specifically, we seek to address the following research questions:
1.
What are the 10 most critical managerial and technical issues IS personnel in Canada perceive they will face over the next 5 years? What is the order of importance of these issues?
2.
How much agreement is there among the different levels of IS personnel on the key issues and their importance?
3.
How do the 10 top Canadian critical issues compare with data collected in international studies during a similar time period?
Our results suggest that the concerns of Canadian IS personnel are different from those of 10 years ago. In addition, the prioritization of issues is significantly different. It is also apparent that there are interesting differences between IS executives and lower level IS management. External consultants appear to play a strategic role, rather than a basic outsourcing role.
Interesting similarities and differences between the current results and those reported in other countries are also evident. The fact that a responsive IT infrastructure is important to many countries is consistent with the need to be flexible in today’s global business environment. Data would suggest that IS managers the world over, need to pay more attention to software development and technology application. Furthermore, developing countries would be well advised to plan for increased telecommunications’ infrastructures. Not only are firms faced with increasing advances in personal computing technology, but great improvements in networking capability is near. For example, diverse, high bandwidth telecommunications projects will amplify the move to electronic commerce. IS personnel must be flexible enough to embrace this. As we more deeply enter the network age, distributed systems and process management will be mission critical.
