A influência das mudanças organizacionais nos sistemas de informação

Little research effort has been put forward to understand the advances in Information Technology (IT) as a social phenomenon, influenced by organizational changes. Consequently, a clear answer has not yet been found about which organizational and information system variables relate with each other and most importantly why that relationship occurs. This research is an attempt to fill in the blanks, at least partially. By analyzing 519 firms that have recently implemented change programs, such as Balanced Scorecard, Reengineering, ISO 9000, Organization Learning, Knowledge Management, Total Quality Management among others, this research develop measurement models for change program’s business strategies, organizational utilizations of IT, and characteristics of the Information Systems, followed by a structural equation model examining the impact of change program’s business strategies on information systems. Results from a exploratory factor analyses using part of the sample (N=200), and confirmatory factor analyses using structural equation with the remaining responses indicate five latent variables for business strategies: development of planning, development of human capital, cost reduction, output quality, and organizational image; three latent variables for organizational utilizations of IT, that have as its goal to support: interaction, structuration, and direction; and four latent variables for characteristics of Information System, that are: scope, accessibility, integration and focus on decision support. Results from the analysis of the causal model using structural equation indicate that (1) developments of planning, developments of human capital, cost reduction and output quality have significant, indirect, and positive effects on the scope; (2) developments of human capital and cost reduction have significant, indirect, and positive effects on the accessibility; (3) developments of planning, developments of human capital, cost reduction, and organizational image have significant, indirect, and positive effect on integration; and (4) developments of planning, developments of human capital, organizational image, and output quality have significant, indirect, and positive effect on focus on decision support. The dissertation explains these indirect effects by demonstrating direct effects of business strategies on organizational utilization of IT followed by direct effects of organizational utilization of IT on characteristics of information systems. Therefore, this research concludes that developments of human capital and cost reduction have significant and positive effect on interaction, which significantly and positively influences scope, accessibility and integration. Specifically for structuration, it is found that developments of planning and organizational image have significant and positive effect on it, whereas development of human capital has a significant but negative effect on it, in addition structuration has significant and positive influences on integration and focus. Finally, by observing the relationships with direction support, the investigation shows that developments of planning and output quality have significant and positive effects on it, which by its turn significantly and positively impacts scope and focus of the information systems.