Application of a Holistic Information Systems Strategy for Organisational Management (Hissom), to an E-Commerce Card Payment Processor

Alignment of organisational strategy with Information Systems Strategy (ISS) has become critical as adoption of Information Systems (IS ) over the last 50 years has escalated. IS capabilities have evolved from central, internally controlled and strictly restricted data processing and automation architectures, to less structured, globally distributed and largely unregulated, Internet-linked IS. Established organisations must adjust to the pace new Web based IS innovations dictate. One area of particular interest in Internet-based IS developments has been the emergence of e-commerce direct to the general public through provision of electronic data interchange (EDI) facilities supporting credit and debit card payments, hitherto transacted only face-to-face and through mail/telephone channels. These developments have, however, highlighted a complexity hitherto unrecognised in IS research, emphasising the need to balance the competing influences of internal and external stakeholder groups upon organisational direction. Recently, the influence of the global investment community, in pursuit of the big payoff, fuelled Internet start-ups boasting IS “breakthrough paradigms”, unchallenged by strategic logic. Established organisations reacted, countering unquantifiable threats, hastily reorganising scarce IS resources. Alignment between organisational and IS strategy was little considered, despite the commercial stakes. Many of these IS failed to deliver, raising questions over their real strategic rationale. The HISSOM model addresses these weaknesses, providing action-based research to support the application of a useable, holistic ISS model, yielding insight into the perspectives that influence organisational behaviours. HISSOM has previously been applied successfully to the integration of two established, large-scale European financial services organisations, facilitating the first Internet-enabled ISS for the combined organisation. In that integration, the maturity of the management processes, organisational capabilities and functional interaction aided the balancing of different organisational perspectives, resulting in strategic alignment. This led to the question whether HISSOM in its current form was flexible enough to be applied to a new organisational setting, in which the maturity of management processes and organisational capabilities was less well established. To answer this question, HISSOM is herein applied to an Internet entrant in the global card payment industry, facilitating e-commerce through Internet enabled EDI for card payments. The cultural interaction of entrepreneurial top management with internal and external stakeholders is highlighted. The strategic model developed by HISSOM is discussed, and the destructive impact of discarding fundamental ISS and organisational strategy principles in favour of entrepreneurial initiative, resulting in the failure of the organisation to meet its public targets, is summarised.