Critical organizational challenges in delivering business value from IT: the Perspective of Lebanese CIOs

The collective body of theoretical and empirical research in Information Systems (IS) comes mainly from the West. While there is emerging IS research in some developing countries and parts of the Middle East, the research agenda in Lebanon is so far non-existent. This study forms part of a larger research project to explore and analyze the perceived value of IS and the organizational competencies needed to deliver that value in Lebanon. Many of the challenges faced by Lebanese organizations are also dominant in the literature. These include resistance to change, which is often found in large and mature organizations and often exacerbated by enterprise IS projects. Other common challenge include how to enrich the IS literacy of Line Managers and users; how to improve CIO to CxO relations; and management of benefits to be derived from IT. There are, however, many challenges that are unique to Lebanon, which include the overabundance of family owned and controlled businesses, with consequent mixed impacts on the management of IS. Lack of political, economic and social stability in Lebanon poses further challenges, as does the heavily regulated telecomm sector resulting in expensive, unreliable, and inconsistent access to networks and bandwidth. Further challenges arise from the often damaging effects of the local culture of individualism, procrastination, and entitlement. There are also many challenges associated with the growing pains of the IS discipline in Lebanon, including: lack of formal IS Governance; heterogeneous and unduly complex applications architectures; talent management; and how to improve the competence of partners. These challenges may best be mitigated by developing organization-wide IS competencies, and the development of these competencies is an organization-wide responsibility.