Conceptualizing IT Management: Testing a Competing Values Model of Policy Compliance

Despite a wealth of prescriptive literature intended to assist practitioners to manage information technology more effectively, there is ample evidence that many organizations continue to experience serious difficulties in achieving desired levels of success in implementing strategic IT initiatives. This paper describes a research design intended to investigate whether identification of an organization’s cultural archetypes can provide a useful predictor of compliance with accepted IT management prescriptions as a reflection of IT management effectiveness. The proposed study applies the “competing values model” as a means of operationalizing organizational culture to ascertain whether identified cultural archetypes may prove useful in predicting the extent and quality of organizational IT management efforts.