Us and them: a social capital perspective on the relationship between the business and IT departments

Abstract

In this paper, a social capital perspective is applied to the relationship between the IT department and the Business organization. IT and Business are conceptualized as different occupational communities, with different understandings of their work. Our focus is on the level of social capital and the process of knowledge sharing between these occupational communities. We analyze the role that these factors play in reaching a mutual understanding within the process of IS development, and the influence this has on the perceived performance of the IT organization. Our study, combining qualitative and quantitative methods, points out that a lack of social capital (structural, relational as well as cognitive) can serve as an explanation for the often problematic relationship between these communities. Our analyses also show that social capital is especially relevant for the Business organization's perception of IT performance, whereas the IT department's perception is that performance is primarily dependent on the exchange of information.

Keywords:

• IT–business relationship
• social capital
• knowledge sharing
• occupational communities

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Associate Editor and three anonymous reviewers for this journal, as well as attendees of the 2008 Conference of the International Communication Association for their useful feedback on previous versions of this paper. We would also like to thank Dr. Jörg Henseler for kindly providing us with his Excel tool for conducting a Multigroup Analysis in PLS.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bart van den Hooff

About the authors

Bart van den Hooff is an associate professor at the VU University Amsterdam, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration. His research focuses on issues concerning the management of knowledge sharing in organizations and networks, online interaction, and the use of ICTs in organizations. He has presented his work at international conferences and published in journals like Journal of Management Studies, Information & Management, Communication Research, Information Processing & Management and Journal of Information Technology.

Maarten de Winter

Maarten de Winter (M.Sc.) is a consultant working for Accenture in the field of IT-business alignment. This area of interest covers the alignment among people, processes, systems and the organization. He studied Business Administration at the VU University in Amsterdam, specializing on the IT-business relationship. Specifically, he focused on the hard and soft factors that are crucial in this relationship as well as the interaction between these.