RESEARCH FRAMEWORK

The World IT Project examines various IT employee issues, such as organizational IT issues, technology issues, and individual issues. Among organizational IT issues are IT strategic planning, IT-business alignment, business process reengineering, security and privacy, and IT reliability and efficiency, to name a few. Technology issues include cloud computing, social media, ERP systems, business intelligence, and big data, again to name just a few. Examples of the individual issues include job satisfaction, efficacy, and role ambiguity. For a deeper understanding of these issues, the context is important. These contextual variables include such factors as the organizational variables (to include structure and strategy), organizational culture, IT occupational culture, and national culture. At this time, we have explicated each one of these factors into its constituent parts. Specific instantiations of the framework will results in a large number of analyses and studies from the massive dataset. As examples of descriptive studies, a group of researchers could compare the IT occupational culture among countries, another could compare organizational IT issues, another could compare individual issues, and yet another could compare technology issues. In order to get insights into the nature of the issues and develop the ability to proactively influence them, researchers could develop theory-based or grounded models to evaluate the effects of various contextual factors on the world IT issues. The possibilities are almost limitless. To be certain, some evolution is expected in research goals as the research team develops more knowledge and first-hand experience.