DEMYSTIFYING IT ORGANIZATIONAL IDENTITY IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS RESEARCH

The significance of Information Technology (IT) has escalated dramatically over the last few decades. In traditional organizations, IT has served as operation backbones that impenetrate through the whole organizations. In the newly developing organizations such as E-Commerce, IT has been considered as the core competence that brings competitiveness. Although studies on IT-enabled organizational achievements such as agility, sustainability and transformation have been widely conducted, the identity of IT has not yet been explicitly conceptualized. Our research therefore aims to demystify the identity of IT in the IS research by proposing a new concept, which is IT organizational identity. This concept has been introduced and applied to analyze IT departments and IT organizations in our research. Our findings provide managerial mechanisms to make employees more willing to adapt to the IT changes through developing appropriate IT organizational identities at different phases. Also, the IT organizational identity serves as a strategic guidepost for IT implementations. Our contributions are twofold. First, the introduction of IT organizational identity into IS research domains deepens our understandings toward some unresolved IS issues such as how to achieve IT-enabled agility. Second, our studies offer refreshing insights into the organizational identity literature and verify and complement the existing propositions with empirical evidences.

Author dc:creator

• WANG ZHENG

• IT Organizational Identity, Identity Management, Identity Construction, Identity Enablement, Case Research