عوامل موفقیت برای استراتژی لجستیک اطلاعات - تحقیق تجربی

Providing analytical information to all stakeholders in a timely manner remains, in the face of current challenges, a key issue in organizations. Information logistics (IL) extends present concepts of decision support like business intelligence by focusing on enterprise-wide information supply and the exploitation of synergies. The article investigates which factors play critical roles in the success of IL strategies. An empirical study by means of a causal analysis provides evidence for significant relationships between those factors and organizational performance. The study identifies comprehensiveness, flexibility, support, communication, IT strategy orientation, business/IT partnership, and project collaboration as influencing factors for IL strategy success. Not all success factors, however, validated in related strategy research can be confirmed in the IL context.

Analytical information systems (AIS) represent an essential component of the enterprise application landscape. Current trends like compliance management, the need for cost reduction, and globalization demand increasingly the delivery of the right information to the right people at the right time for decision-making purposes. Up to now, concepts like business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DWH) have been dedicated to the systematic and purposeful analysis of an organization and its competitive environment. Therefore, they are of ongoing high relevance for an organization's information management [5] and [86]. Current studies confirm this observation. Luftman and Ben-Zvi, for example, have identified BI as the most important key issue for CIOs [61]. Increasingly, persons in charge of providing analytical information have to consider the entirety of decision support initiatives in a comprehensive and superior manner; as well as the long investment cycles and the infrastructure character of these projects. These requirements are in particular addressed by the information logistics (IL) approach [22] and [23]. IL is intended to serve as a conceptual foundation for supporting a large variety of decisions in an organization and across organizational boundaries, thereby focusing on the exploitation of synergies rather than on ‘local’ processes and user specific decision support. It can be seen as an extension to ‘traditional’ decision support approaches like BI and DWH. Both the previous approaches and the new paradigm of IL require the overall, superior, and long range planning, implementation, and control of all related activities in order to reach the specified goals — by doing the right things (effectiveness) and doing things right (efficiency). In other words, a strategy (and according governance structures) is needed. Based on the IL understanding (cf. Section 2.1) and on Earl's definition of information technology (IT) strategy [24], IL strategy is understood as a concept to systematically pursue long-range, enterprise-wide, aggregate goals for IL in sync with IT strategy and business strategy [22]. It is widely accepted that a strategy is characterized by two perspectives [e.g. 67]. Introduced by Chandler [11], Ansoff [4], and Andrews [3], the distinction between strategy content and strategy process research represents a leading division of the discipline, with far-reaching implications even today [54]. The content-related perspective specifies the strategic positioning by defining goals. However, a workable strategy should by no means be limited to the mere statements on goals — it must also show concrete development paths and ways to achieve those goals. This perspective is addressed by the strategy process. Strategy process research deals primarily with the actions that lead to and support strategy [54]. The Harvard Business School, and in particular Andrews [3], developed a model of strategy process and introduced the influential two-stage distinction of strategy formulation and strategy implementation. IL strategy aims at coordinating the diversity and multitude of ‘local’ goals (of different organizational units or functions), at harmonizing solution ‘islands’ technically and/or from a business point of view, and at aligning short-terms targets with long-term planning. It has to be permanently reviewed and be adapted if necessary to business strategy amendments, IT strategy updates, and technology innovations, since the business environment is quite volatile [22]. Many organizations are currently faced with implementing an IL strategy or BI strategy, respectively. According to Dinter and Winter [22], only 9.3% of the organizations have already implemented a dedicated IL/BI strategy, 43.7% are currently implementing, and 37.1% plan to implement such a strategy. These figures underline the need for methodological guidance when planning and implementing IL/BI strategies. Advice regarding the strategy content and regarding the strategy process (cf. above) is not enough; organizations also need assistance in determining which factors might influence the success of such an implementation. However, there have been very few contributions to IL/BI strategy from the scientific community (cf. Section 2.2). In particular, to the best of our knowledge there are no publications that address the success factors for IL/BI strategy explicitly and comprehensively. The paper at hand aims at closing this research gap and answering the following research question by means of empirical analyses: What are the predominant critical success factors of IL strategy, i.e. which factors have significant impact on the success of an IL strategy within real-world organizations? The gain in insight with respect to this research question may be beneficial to both the scientific community and real-world organizations. The results also provide guidance which factors should be considered when thinking about analytics holistically, i.e. when broadening the perspective from single instances of BI projects to an enterprise IL strategy. Finally, we might — as a side-effect — gain insight if the IL concept contributes to organizational performance. The remainder of this article is structured as follows: The second section provides an introduction to the concept of information logistics, an overview of the state of the art regarding IL/BI strategy, and an overview of success factors for various strategy research streams. In Section 3 the research model and its hypotheses are presented. The design and procedure of an empirical analysis that was conducted by means of structural equation modeling in order to address the research question is outlined in the forth section. Section 5 includes the results of the analysis, i.e. the success factors for IL strategy. These findings are interpreted and discussed, and the need for further research is identified in the sixth section, which concludes the article.

The primary objective of this study was to increase our understanding of the key success factors for IL strategy. The results can be transferred to BI strategies as well since the IL approach can be seen as an extension to predecessor concepts like BI and data warehousing. Based on literature, nine constructs were identified as possible factors affecting IL strategy success. Seven of these nine factors were confirmed by the study, namely comprehensiveness, flexibility, support, communication, IT strategy orientation, business/IT partnership, and project collaboration. The results emphasize the need to consider IL strategy formulation and implementation as a comprehensive, well defined and aligned process whose success depends on many factors. Taking these factors into account positively influences an organization's performance.