Behavioral Factors and Information Technology Infrastructure Considerations in Strategic Alliance Development

Since behavioral and cultural factors play a major role in strategic alliances between partners, IT managers must understand the intricacies involved in the development of resultant IT infrastructure in satisfying both business requirements and cultural fit of the aligned partnering units. This paper first highlights the IT-related issues and cultural issues which are important in the process of developing a strategic alliance between partners. Then, a case study involving a major telecommunications organization and several retail electricity organizations is presented to illustrate the IT requirements and human-related considerations. The analysis focuses on the requirements of pre-strategic alliance phase of the negotiation process. IntroductIon Information technologies (IT) such as the Internet, WWW, EDI, and so forth, have already changed, and are still changing, the way organizations do business today (Housel & Skopec, 2001; Mandal & Gunasekaran, 2003). Significant movement that has occurred relatively recently is the push toward worldwide and national integration of information systems (Dutta, Lanvin, & Paua, 2003; Kumar & van Hillegersberg, 2000; Laughlin, 1999; Palaniswamy & Tyler, 2000; Shore 1996) for organizations to achieve competitive advantages. Since it has become critical for businesses to be able to get to relevant data and information quickly and easily, large information systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, supply chain management (SCM), enterprise resource/relationship management (ERM), enterprise application