Inter Organizational Evaluation of SISP; What New Criteria Are Needed?

During the three decades of research and practice, the image of Strategic Information Systems Planning has changed considerably. Flexibility, creativity, strategic thinking, and sharing of knowledge are seen as the new ways to both formulate and realize strategy. IT governance has provided a more flexible concept to discuss managerial efforts to align IT with business. But maybe the most important change has been left unattended, that is the introduction of information strategy in networks. Still, many organizations continue to use planning as a way to support their decisionmaking internally without co-operating with their business partners. Also the view of evaluating SISP effectiveness has matured. A recent research concluded six dimensions for evaluating the planning process and four criteria for evaluating its effectiveness. These studies are mainly quantitative and this paper qualitatively validates the same dimensions in a case study. Two inter organizational studies from literature add five new factors: competitive pressure, trading partner readiness, contractual level, financial agreements and certainty of implementation. This study used the internal dimensions and criteria as basis for conducting a qualitative evaluation of SISP in two case studies, one single organization case and one inter organizational case. The results of the first case confirm that these criteria provide a good basis for overall evaluation of SISP internally. In addition to the internal theory based evaluation, also an interorganizational exploration was done to explore the differences and the new evaluation criteria needed. The result is a conceptual interview framework to be tested in practice.