6. Conclusion and implication
This study examines the roles of the CEO and CIO in fostering entrepreneurial alertness for developing value out of process capital through a longitudinal case study of a leading international IC distribution company. Based on the case study, this study formulated insights into entrepreneurial alertness building as both knowledge-based and project-oriented. Underlying this view is the assumption that acquiring,
assimilating, and sharing new information between the business and technology areas is central to the
emergence of strategic foresight and systematic insight into the firm’s stock of process capital. The case findings highlight the importance of the emergence of joint fields for boundary spanning between CEO and CIO for building the specific organizational capabilities. It is essential to point out that entrepreneurial alertness toward process capital opportunities comes neither from the CEO’s intuition nor from free talks between the CIO and business representatives. Instead, it appears to follow a pattern of systemic accumulation of operational experience and synergy building between business and technology. This does not imply that the CEO and CIO are systematically and rationally searching their environment for competitive imperfections.
Rather, this study argues that these individuals become aware of such competitive imperfections through their day-to-day activities (Krzner 1989), and that day-to-day activities are in turn shaped by boundary-spanning actions taken by both the CEO and CIO.
The studied case illuminates how boundary spanning can be driven and leveraged by the CEO and CIO for process value development and used to support knowledge management across boundaries by focusing on fostering the emergence of new joint fields. Boundary-spanning theory allows us to view diverse aspects of entrepreneurial alertness through a single theoretical lens and focus on the path of knowledge accumulation of the enterprise. Findings about the emergence of boundary-spanning activities, agents, and organizational units provide an enhanced explanation of the importance of communication between the CEO and CIO in
developing value from the resources of the firm. The experience of ICD suggests that the knowledge
interaction between the CEO and CIO must be topic-focused, shaped by both parties, and joined by multiple agents across related boundaries.
The paper also reinforces current practitioner thinking (Sauer and Willcocks, 2002), which suggests that one of the most compelling emerging organizational roles of IS is that of increasing alertness for process flexibility and business innovation. This finding provides a backdrop against which practitioners can evaluate their entrepreneurial alertness management scheme to (1) enhance the quality of communication between business and technology, and (2) identify joint fields in practice and nominate agents to participate.
Finally, the nature of the link between entrepreneurial alertness and process capital is context-specific and is hence likely to play out differently in different organizations and industries. For instance, as the
processes in a firm and industry become more heavily networked, process boundaries expand across the firm’s formal external boundaries. However, such expansions would appear to be mediated by the knowledge base and technological capabilities of the partner firms. Hence, it would be useful to explore how the CEO and CIO reach across firm and unit boundaries to the CEOs and CIOs in such networks and build entrepreneurial alertness for leveraging the processes they choose to connect. Extensions of the analysis described here to other contexts may provide further support for, and greater understanding of, the development of value out of process capital in today’s networked economic relationships.
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