Aligning information technology (IT) strategy with business strategy has been one of the top concerns of practitioners and scholars for decades. Although numerous studies have documented positive effects of IT-business alignment on organizational performance, our knowledge about this relationship is still limited due to the complexity of contingent factors. The extant literature is largely based on research in the context of developed countries and few studies have explicitly considered the effects of contextual factors such as market environment and competitive strategy on this relationship. In this study, we attempt to fill these gaps by testing the alignment-performance relationship in a developing country setting and investigating the moderating roles of environmental uncertainty and strategic orientation on the performance effects of strategic alignment using survey data collected in Turkey. Our analyses show that this positive effect is statistically significant in highly uncertain environments and varies across performance measures. Our results also show that the strategic alignment between IT and business has a significant impact on performance across all choices of strategic orientation -defender, prospector, or analyzer. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed and future research directions are explored.

The stock market reactions to information technology (IT)-related events have often been used as proxies to the value or cost of these events in the information systems literature. In this paper, we study the stock market reactions to information-security-related events using the event analysis methodology with consideration of the effects of a number of contingency factors, including business type, industry, type of breach, event year, and length of event window. We found that pure e-commerce firms experienced higher negative market reactions than traditional bricks-and-mortar firms in the event of security breach. We also found that denial of service attacks had higher negative impact than other types of security breaches. Finally, security events occurred in recent years were found to have less significant impact than those occurred earlier, suggesting that investors may have become less sensitive to the security events. Most interestingly, our analyses showed that the magnitude and longevity of security breaches vary with time across sub-samples. This raises some serious questions regarding the validity of analyzing only short-term stock market reactions as an indicator of the cost of security breaches, and in general, an indicator of the value of IT-related events. The implications of these results are discussed and potential future research directions are proposed.

Chief information officers (CIOs) play increasingly strategic roles in firms in this competitive global economy, which is now largely powered by information technology (IT). However, research has shown a lack of board of directors’ oversight on CIO‐ and IT‐related issues. Drawing on agency, resource dependence, and alignment theories, we investigate the effect of board of directors’ IT awareness on CIO compensation structure and firm performance. We conduct cross‐sectional time series analyses of data collected from various sources. Our study underlines three important findings. First, we show that some commonly known executive compensation determinants, such as individual characteristics and governance structure, do not have significant effects on CIO compensation structure. Second, with regard to CIO compensation structure, firms respond to increasing information asymmetry differently according to the level of IT awareness of their boards. Finally, firms perform better when their boards have higher levels of IT awareness, and this positive effect of IT awareness is considerably larger in IT intensive industries. Overall, our study provides empirical support for the important role of boards’ IT awareness in shaping CIO compensation and improving firm performance. Our results suggest that boards with functional area knowledge—or higher IT awareness in this case—can more effectively monitor and better incentivize executives, and consequently lead to better firm performance.

The purpose of this research is to examine country institutional profile for encouraging entrepreneurial activity in two developmental states: South Korea and United Arab Emirates. Data was collected from business students in the two countries to examine the favorability of their institutional environment for entrepreneurship. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated high reliability, construct validity and internal consistency for the Korean and Arabic language versions of the questionnaire instrument in the respective countries. Results revealed important cross-national differences between the two countries in the regulatory, cognitive and normative dimensions of the institutional environment. Implications, limitations and future research directions are discussed.

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