Title: Understanding the relationship between business and IT groups: a personal construct theory approach

Authors: Senaka Fernando, Mark Lycett, Sergio De Cesare

Addresses: School of Information Systems, Computing and Mathematics, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UB8 3PH, UK. ' School of Information Systems, Computing and Mathematics, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UB8 3PH, UK. ' School of Information Systems, Computing and Mathematics, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UB8 3PH, UK

Abstract: The relationship between business and Information Technology (IT) groups in organisations has consistently ranked as an important concern among business and IT managers. As a result, several researchers have investigated the means of improving the business/IT relationship. They focus on behaviours of business and IT groups and attempt to develop change management programmes as a vehicle for obtaining desired behaviours from business and IT groups in order to improve the |relationship|. However, research shows that such attempts have a low success rate in attaining an effective |relationship|. This paper argues that the reason for this is that most researchers tend to focus on behaviours of people without an in-depth understanding of their cognition, which influences those behaviours. Consequently, the paper proposes a cognitive approach and explores the application of Personal Construct Theory (PCT) to understand the |relationship| and means to improve it.

Keywords: business-IT relationship; information technology; cognition; PCT; elaboration; resistance; change management; group behaviour; personal construct theory; networking; virtual organisations; IT groups; business-IT groups.

DOI: 10.1504/IJNVO.2006.011871

International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations, 2006 Vol.3 No.4, pp.438 - 449

Published online: 28 Dec 2006 *

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