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Thesis

French

ID: <

10670/1.el9o6i

>

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Testing the alignment of usages of the Information System : the case of companies having entrusted their Information System to a Shared Services Center

Abstract

The aim of our research is to improve the understanding that we have towards the Shared Service Centers (SSC), a way of organization which has been the trend in the last years. To be more specific, the aim of our work is to explore the existing singularity between this specific organizational method, which is the SSC applied to the Information System (IS) and the strategic alignment with the enterprise. The objective of this paper is therefore to test the impact of the IS alignment in a company which uses the SSC. We have considered to study our question under the aspect of the variation of the IS alignment and the stakeholder’s “satisfaction”. We focalized on the postoperative handover (alignment of usages). This approach includes the “dynamic” and “usage” terms and takes into account the temporary and relational dimensions. Our work is inserted in a new research field that provides them with an explorative characteristic. We have built our strategy and our research study in a progressive way. Beforehand, it has seemed to us crucial to undergo a theoretic exploration of the subjects related to our research, in order to build simultaneously the basis and the purpose of the mentioned approach. The knowledge we have acquired has led us to elaborate conceptual proposals (6 hypotheses) from a constructivist perspective. These proposals were built during initial exploration tests and afterwards they were tested in European companies using one or more SSC. It seemed to us more logical to adopt the complementarity of a dual qualitative approach. On one hand, we studied in detail one company and, on the other hand, we have realized a poly organizational study, composed by 5 case studies, which were based on 9 semi-directive interviews.The variety of the results obtained tends to demonstrate the singularity of our research. Two proposals must be highlighted. The first one is that the strategic alignment in the long term is reinforced by the use of a SSC (hypothesis 1) and the second one is linked to the fact that the external stakeholders can be easily managed by the clients’ enterprises which use a SSC (hypothesis 3). More generally, we have verified two other interesting contributions during our research. The first one is linked to a larger stability in the case of deep changes as, for example, a merger or a takeover (hypothesis 2 and 6). Our academic research has reached the conclusion that the SSC is a factor which offers stability to the company that uses it. The second contribution is fundamental, that is, it covers the importance of the interfaces between the SSC and the other internal parties involved. The connections between the different groups are essential in order to obtain and to maintain a good alignment.

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