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Examining the Strategic Alignment and Implementation Success of a KMS: A Subculture-Based Multilevel Analysis

School of Business Information Technology, RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria 3000, Australia
Department of Information Systems, School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117543, Republic of Singapore
Hankamer School of Business, Baylor University, Waco, Texas 76798
ravi.shankar{at}rmit.edu.au
pansl{at}comp.nus.edu.sg
dorothy_leidner{at}baylor.edu

Two important gaps exist in the information systems (IS) alignment research. First, there is scant research on the potential of organizational culture, and specifically subcultures to influence the strategic alignment of IS and organizations. Second, there is a dearth of literature that considers the relationship between alignment and implementation success. In this paper, we address both of these gaps by considering the influence of organizational subcultures on the alignment of a specific IS—a knowledge management system (KMS)—with organizational strategy. Our analysis demonstrates the important roles played by three different subcultures—enhancing, countercultural, and chameleon—in the alignment of the KMS. The analysis also underscores the complementary nature of the alignment and implementation literatures and suggests that they should be used in concert to explain the success of an IS. Drawing on our analysis, we build a subculture model, which depicts the intersection of alignment and implementation. From a managerial perspective, the subculture model highlights three different approaches to managing alignment and implementation. From a theoretical perspective, our paper highlights the need for IS alignment models to be modified, so that subunit-level analyses are incorporated. It also illustrates that organizations confront challenges of alignment and implementation simultaneously rather than sequentially.

Key Words: strategic alignment; information systems implementation; knowledge management systems; organizational subcultures; case study
History: This paper was received on August 7, 2006.