A Survey on Business and Information Technology in Taiwan- Annual report 2007

Abstract

The Business and Information Technologies (BIT) project, lead by researchers at UCLA Anderson School of Management, investigates the impact of new information technologies on business practices and industry structure (Karmarkar & Mangal, 2004). Special focus is on \"the Internet phenomenon\" that essentially drives the rapid advances of information technologies. The BIT project is being conducted internationally: SDA Bocconi (Italy), SOM-IITB (India), Theseus Institute (France), The World Internet Institute (Sweden), EIM (Germany), IESE (Spain), PUC (Chile), Korea University (Korea), CEIBS (China), IIT Mumbai (India), and SDA Bocconi (Italy). The global perspective is expected to unveil the reality of business practice affected by technological change. This study reports the BIT project results in Taiwan. The survey was sent to senior information systems managers or Chief Information Officers (CIO) who make independent decisions on information and communications technologies systems. For business organizations, questionnaires were mailed to over 2000 companies by systematically sampling the database of the largest 5000 corporations in Taiwan. For government organizations, questionnaires were mailed to center government offices, local authorities, and state-owned enterprises. For each surveyed organization, we chose a correspondent who is either an alumnus or an acquaintance of the principal investigators in order to increase the questionnaire response rate. The CIOs (and related positions) were requested to complete the survey either by mail, fax or online, where the survey instrument was also made available. About 436 responses were received. This report addresses business practices, the evolving workplace, changing organizational forms, and technology adoption. In addition to the original BIT questionnaire, we added questions to further explore factors expected to influence technology adoption decisions: dynamic environment, dynamic capabilities, and the fit between the above two factors.