eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

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PURPOSE OF THE THESIS

The objective of this thesis is to understand the factors that affect the role of the CIOs in enterprises as well as to examine the role of the CIOs in Finnish enterprises. Moreover, the objective is to understand the role of IT in business strategy planning and execution. Finally, this thesis tries to provide both theoretical and empirical research based suggestions to Finnish enterprises in relation to the research questions of this thesis.

METHODOLOGY

The research is started with a literature review where the emphasis was on such issues as IT governance and the role of CIOs in organizations. The data collection of the empirical part of the study is done with 27 semi-structured interviews involving CIOs, CFOs and CEOs in 19 enterprises. Semi-structured interview questions are augmented with open ended questions with the aim to deepen analysis on issues covered by the interview questions as well as to better understand responses received.

RESULTS

The main finding of this thesis is that the CIO’s role has already evolved into that of a business executive in IT-intensive industries and enterprises. In many other enterprises, the challenge is how to manage the transformation of technically-oriented IT managers into business executives without losing necessary technical competencies.

From the CIO’s perspective it is more critical to have access to strategy planning and execution than to have a high organizational status with no such access. The CIO needs not to be a formal member in the executive committee, if the CIO has continuous access to and an active role in the business strategy process and if the needs to organize the executive level responsibilities of IT are understood by the CEO and/or executive committee members. Within this context, the empowerment of CIOs to make strategic decisions will increase the value delivery from the use of IT. Still, one of the easy means to improve the business value delivery of IT is to have the CIO to report to the CEO. This will improve the linkage of business and IT strategies in a natural way. The mentioned impact can be boosted if the CIO is made a member of the executive committee. To carve out more value from the use of IT an enterprise needs to establish a close and interactive relationship between business and IT strategy processes.