From the Editor

This issue commences with the article entitled, “The impact of national culture on strategic IT alignment: A multiple-case study of subsidiaries of multinational corporations.” Authors Godfried B. Adaba, David W. Wilson, and Julian Sims examine the impact of national culture on strategic information technology alignment. The findings reveal that the headquarters and subsidiary host national cultures affect alignment indirectly, through variables in the organizational context, including intercultural communications, IT governance, management style, differences in work values and practices, and cultural conflict and mistrust. In the next article, “How the personalities and behaviors of information systems professionals influence the effectiveness of information systems departments,” authors Hadi Karimikia, Harminder Singh, and Brian Donnellan explore how IS-specific organizational citizenship behavior of IS professionals impact the perceived effectiveness of IS departments and in turn, how this behavior is affected by the personal attributes of IS professionals, the leadership style of IS leaders, and the quality of the interactions within IS departments. In the third article, authors Stefan Klotz, Simon Kratzer, Markus Westner, and Susanne Strahringer analyze the usage of vignettes as a narrative form in information systems research in their article entitled, “Literary sketches in information systems research: conceptualization and guidance for using vignettes as a narrative form.” Guidance for scholars on how to effectively use vignettes as a narrative form is provided, based on the characteristics of different vignette archetypes and best practices in information systems literature. Finally, in the fourth and final article, Christof Gellweiler and Lakshman Krishnamurthi expand IT value by adding a customer-based view to the prevalent resource-based view in their article entitled “IT business value and competitive advantage: Integrating a customer-based view.” Specifically, an integrated definition for IT value consisting of two complementary facets: monetary customer value and nonmonetary organizational value is suggested.