Behavioral Factors in Strategic Alliances

Abstract

Recently, there has been a growing trend among information technology (IT) organizations to form strategic alliances to increase competitive advantages in the marketplace. For an organization to exploit the benefits of alliances, human factors and IT factors must be among the basic components of any strategic plan (Kemeny & Yanowitz, 2000). Despite the obvious need to consider human and IT factors when developing a long-term plan, many strategic plans developed in the past that led to alliances have failed to consider human aspects. Examples of failure in the implementation of IT systems due to the lack of consideration of human factors have come to light in recent years, but a comprehensive study of the consideration of human factors in the development of strategic alliances resulting in a major IT system alignment for a firm, is still rare in IT literature.