Dissertation Abstract
Graduate Institute of Business Administration
National Taiwan University
Name:Don-Liang Shieh Month/Year:June,1998
Adviser:Dr. Ching-Cha Hsieh
The research on Organizational Inertia
and IT-enabled Business Transformation
Business transformations are important means of organization to adapt to
changing competitive environment.However,the rapid development and propagation
of information technology has forced the organizations to take the information
technology dimension into account besides conventional strategy and structure
dimensions,when the organizations are embarking to transformation.Since most
organizational change theories take rational adaptation perspective,but in fact
organizational changes always confront different intensity of resistences and
difficulties,so in this research we use inertia to represent the tendency of
uneasiness of organizational change in order to understand the impact of
inertia on the business transformation process and organizational adaptive
capability.
The qualitative research method is used in this research,we combined theory
inference and case observation to develop related theories.Based on
organizational change theories and organizational configuration theories,the
attributes of ideal organizational change model are proposed,on the other hand
we know from real case observation that the ideal model must also include
inertia to be more complete.On this account we combined Henderson''s Strategic
Alignment Model and inertia at the structural level,in other words this is
the combination of rational adaptation model of organizational
configuration and
inertia,in this model the bivariate fits are replaced by the multivariate fit,
and the model not only includes change procedures but also
change contents,so we
can expect the modified model are more realistic to provide an analytic
framework to IT-enabled business transformation and better management for
the planning and execution phases of the transformation.
The results of case studies indicate that indeed the modified model is more
powerful in explanation of the phenomena during the transformation
process,especially in the choice of transformation alternatives and the
adaptive capability of organization after transformation,more insights can be
gained.Finally,we proposed some hypotheses to be a part of theory
development efforts.