Integrating Emerging Technologies in IT Services Companies – The “Driver” CIO Twenty-second Americas Conference on Information Systems, San Diego, 2016 1 Integrating Emerging Technologies in IT Services Companies – The “Driver” CIO Full paper Nabil Georges Badr Grenoble Graduate School of Business nabil.badr@mailbox.grenoble-em.com Abstract The task of the CIO or information technology (IT) manager is to steer the technology base of the company in the right direction with the right solution choices. To innovate their business models companies often rely on emerging technologies in IT (EIT). Disruption introduced by EIT affects the ability of IT organizations to sustain the continuity of services required by the business. Therefore, IT organizations are reluctant to act quickly to integrate EIT. Through in-depth case studies in IT services companies, field interviews and focus group discussions with practitioners who underwent business model innovations based on IT, the research attempts to learn what mechanisms CIOs adopt to motivate IT organizations to innovate. Whilst proposing several directions for future research, this study offers an empirically supported CIO typology in the context of business model innovation based on IT. Keywords Emerging technologies, IT organizational capability, CIO Typology, CIO capability Introduction Businesses rely on information technology (IT) as a catalyst that enables components of new products, services, channels, processes, and business models (Cash et al, 2008). Whilst business model innovations focus on redefining the business (Johnson, 2010), they often employ innovations in other industries (Mitchell and Coles, 2004), sometimes leveraging emerging technologies in IT (Kraemer et al, 2000). Factually, CIOs lead innovation 1 reached 41 % of organizations in 2014. Innovations based on IT depend greatly on the combination of the technology, the organization’s technical expe rtise, and the organization’s ability to make effective use of the new capabilities (Peppard, 2005). In an era of rapid technological change, the timing of the investment decisions (Cegielsky et al, 2005) with respect to the emerging technology hype cycle becomes an imperative challenge (Bajwa et al, 2008). Rapid change in EIT causes problems for IT managers (Benamati et al, 1997) as they try to integrate EIT into an existing environment. Luftman et al. (2012) and practitioners agree that IT reliability and efficiency as a top management concern. The risk of disrupting to the environment while, at the same time, avoiding the disruption to the services is a real issue. A tension is felt by the IT organization in form of costs, compatibility, and stability of the existing infrastructure and a threat to continuity of the IT services. Chief Information Officers (CIO) have to reinvent themselves, their teams, what they do and how they address these challenges. Mechanisms are required for IT organizations to (1) manage the integration of EIT into the infrastructure; (2) sustain the competitive advantage through IT services in the midst of a rapidly changing environment; and (3) maintain the delivery and support of IT services at service levels that bolster the value of IT in the organization. Inevitably, this is a drain on the resources (Benamati and Lederer, 2010) that support the technology deployments. The challenges facing IT organization are hence elevated to a level at which mechanisms that were effective a few years ago have to be significantly overhauled. Therefore, practitioners attribute their reluctance to integrate emerging technologies in the operational infrastructure in part to the organizational ability to overcome the extant obstacles. Chief Information Officers (CIO) are challenged to maintain the necessary balance between technology 1 Changing Role of the CIO in IT-enabled Business Innovation, Business Wire [New York] 12 Mar 2014 brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by AIS Electronic Library (AISeL)