Information systems' effectiveness and organisational performance

Abstract

For many years researchers have been troubled with the evaluation of Information Systems (IS) concluding to a lack of understanding as to the time, methods and tools for measuring the impact of IS on organisational performance. Motivated by this lacuna in the literature, this thesis explored the relationship between Information Systems’ Effectiveness and Organisational Performance. The theoretical framework is based on the Delone and McLean’s (D&M) IS success model which is widely adopted in the IS research. Based on a comprehensive literature review on the older and more recent studies the research framework incorporated several new items used by researchers for the measurement of the D&M dimensions. Following a web survey on 168 Greek firms this study sheds some light into the IS field by focusing on how IS effectiveness measures affect Organisational Performance. Data for this study was collected by means of a web-link questionnaire and a sample of 700 companies of different sizes operating in various industries. Many descriptive statistics of academic and managerial importance were produced. Following a correlation analysis and Exploratory Factor Analysis, 15 factors were used for Multiple Regression analysis conducted to test a number of hypotheses around the relationship between the dependent construct (organisational performance) and the independent construct (IS effectiveness). This thesis contributes to existing research in the following ways. First, this study extends our knowledge on IS effectiveness as we adapted and modified DeLone and McLean's model of IS success to incorporate new variables from recent research. The results indicate a significant statistical link between IS effectiveness and performance measures. Second, it provides a holistic framework for measuring Organisational Performance with financial and non-financial variables. Finally, the study presents findings from Greek companies that have adopted IS providing practioners with advice for the practices that can lead to possible and realistic benefits.