Driving IT Architecture Innovation: The Roles of Competing Organizational Cultures and Collaborating Upper Echelons

The spotlight on business innovation in growth-oriented organizations has never been hotter. Information systems (IS) innovation, in particular, has become the main focus for many businesses and their CIOs because of its potential for business agility and competitiveness. However, creating a culture that can effectively exploit the innovative forces of an organization is challenging, and no shared guidelines exist. The purpose here is to examine empirically how the competing forces of organizational cultures in tandem with senior executives constructively influence the innovative efforts of organizations. Central to this investigation is the adoption of an IS architecture (SOA) whose implementation may entail radical transformation of traditional business patterns. Data were collected from U.S. top IS executives, and the results suggest that the adopters of SOA (45%) are organizations whose executives embrace certain collaborative behavior, which, in people-oriented and progress-oriented cultures, seems to be a catalyst for change and adoption of transformational IS architecture.