CASE STUDY:

Aligning IT/IS with Organization Business Strategy

The organization that I have chosen to discuss is the one in which I currently work, a healthcare staffing company that works with hospitals all over the country providing care to patients. This staffing company bills patients for the care that our healthcare providers give them and charges the hospital a premium to staff their facility. The senior leadership of the organization has been increasingly influential over the past eight years that I have been with the company, growing the IT/IS departments and infusing them into the rest of the organization. Over the recent years, there has been widespread use of the Internet and telecommunication that has been incorporated into organizations across the county, it has helped to increase the development of knowledge-based economies, connecting organizational departments, increasing staff competency of information technologies, and increasing speed of processing (Chow, 2011). Regarding leadership, understanding the importance of how IT will influence and impact your organization is key to leading your company to a successful future.

Leadership must play a key role in developing the use of IT within an organization, obtaining a deeper perspective to understand, infuse new capabilities, mentoring staff on the importance of its growth, and use within the organization, if organizations fail to implement this process and can lead to poor performance (Toor, 2017). Leadership within our organization understands the importance of incorporating IT into the healthcare industry, keeping patient records that are safe and easily accessible, running reports that before had to be run individually by a person, the integration of IT into the communication of departments and individuals within the organization to make sharing of information, presentations, meeting minutes immediate to everyone needing access regardless of their location.

The integration of IT can help to build human resources platforms that provide tools that can be used to track salary between roles and regions, employee performance, advancement, giving access to open positions, and benefits (Lampert, 2019). Our leadership has done a lot to integrate IT within our various departments including human resources, they give up monthly updates tracking our patient's satisfaction, our productivity, and immediate access to salary and benefits via the organization's applications. They have used IT to help human resources to also build educational platforms to provide continued education and training to our employees to meet the standard of hospitals, and continued training on subjects such as violence in the workplace, sexual harassment, poor attitudes, and risk management.

Aligning information technology and business objectives is important for organizations, potential consequences of IT not being aligned with organizational strategy include lack of cultural change, poor implementation of IT services, lack of education or training for staff, and inadequate communication for process change (Huang, Wu, & Chen, 2013). Understanding that not just IT but all departments should align together with business objections and values is important, within our organization we ask ourselves in what ways can increase patient access to health care, how can we provide better more timely health care, and how can we work together to make our visions a reality. All departments within our organization have felt the support from upper leadership, thru management, and handed down to our team leads to stress the importance of IT and how to implement it into our daily practice. I believe this organization values IT and its applications.

QUESTIONS:

• Compare the examples your colleague shared of potential consequences when IT and business strategies are not aligned with the ones you posted. Share your thoughts on the reasons for the differences between your examples.
• Ask a clarifying question about the integration of IT/IS in your colleague's organization. Share any insights gained from their organization's approach.