TECHNOLOGY MANAGEMENT AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY STRATEGY - PRELIMINARY-RESULTS OF AN EMPIRICAL-STUDY OF CANADIAN ORGANIZATIONS

The strategic use of information technology (IT) has received consider able attention in academic circles from the 1980s on and researchers h ave put forward several prescriptive models which businesses could ado pt in order to identify the strategic potential of IT in business, Mos t of them tried to rationalize their theories using a limited number o f success stories originating largely from American multinational corp orations. Unfortunately. so far, very little empirical research has be en conducted to examine the general validity of the ivory tower theori es. Our project which was conducted in Montreal using a large number o f Canadian companies has been an attempt to discover if we can find an y evidence of the impact of academic theories on the real world of bus iness. This paper addresses three main themes: Do Canadian organizatio ns have a corporate IT strategy? Are organizations in Canada using IT in a strategic fashion? Can we identify any difference between the ser vice and manufacturing sectors concerning the use of IT? In order to a chieve these objectives we used two methods. Since there is overwhelmi ng evidence in the management literature that the Chief Executive Offi cer's annual report to shareholders can serve as a convenient keyhole through which one can observe the evolution of corporate strategy, our first approach involved an examination of a random sample of such rep orts of 39 companies to see if IT matters figured prominently in them, Secondly we used a questionnaire survey of a fairly large number of c ompanies, which formed the major part of our investigation, to ascerta in top management commitment to IT as well as the external orientation of IT systems in order to address the competitive forces faced by com panies.