A Strategy For Promoting Business-IT Fusion To Enhance Management Of Enterprise Applications

This paper is based upon a research study conducted to determine the significance of managerial leadership practices in a corporation’s transformation during the period from 2004 to 2006. The study attempted to discover how business-IT fusion enhances organizational performance. The study answered two questions: how managerial leadership practices effectively advance businessIT fusion of an inclusive and collaborative organization and how business-IT fusion affects risks and profitability. The intention of this study was to contribute to the field of management of information technology grounded on propositions involving organizational development roles, IT governance, and collaborative organizations. Triangulated inquiry from documents and a survey of 24 participants who included 2 women and 22 men comprising a chief information officer, 7 functional managers, 8 project managers, and 8 engineers of a corporation in the northeastern United States confirmed the propositions. The findings indicated that horizontal integration has begun in transition from being separate toward becoming collaborative. This paper will reveal how disparate images that are subculture bound could be enhanced by collaborative and integrative leadership practices. Moreover, the horizontal integration of common financial and technical applications allows work to be transferred across different locations, thus reducing risks and increasing return on investment. This paper will present a collaborative and integrative model integrating organizational development roles, IT governance, and relationship management across organizational settings for transforming effective business-IT fusion.