Culture's consequences for IT application and business process change: a research agenda

Abstract

Enterprises cannot fully realise the benefits of Information Technology (IT) by merely automating their existing business processes. Consequently, large-scale organisational changes enabled by IT, including business process reengineering efforts, have become popular. Differences between nations and societies make it critical to understand how institutional and cultural factors influence IT application and the nature of IT-enabled business process change. Unfortunately, the study of cultural issues still represents a rather isolated and underappreciated subdiscipline within Information Systems (IS). This article builds upon Martinsons and Davison (2003) in order to advance our understanding of how societal culture influences specific IS phenomena. Hofstede's five dimensions are employed systematically to develop a set of researchable propositions. A Hong Kong case provides strong preliminary support for the 12 propositions, which represent an agenda for testing theory by researching how culture influences IT application and business process change.