Study On Impact Of Differentiation On Subunit-Level Performance After Information System Implementation

With economic globalization and the increasing market competition, informatization has become a strategic option for enterprises to improve their synthetical competitive ability. For manufacturing industry which is an indispensable part of national economy, informatization has already become an irresistible trend. In the process of informatization, enterprises often invest a lot in complex construction and management of information systems, but the return is most of the time uncertain. The study was based on the perspective of subunits and analyzed why the performances of information systems are different. It discovered that differentiation among subunits is the factor on organizational structure which influences the performance of IS, and revealed how the influence occurs. This study aimed to improve the performance of information system implementation, thus accelerate the construction process of the informatization of the manufacturing enterprises in China.This research mainly based on the organizational information processing theory (OIPT), and brought forward a theoretical model that differentiation among subunits influences the overall performance of subunits. It introduced the intermediate benefits, which were task efficiency, data quality and coordination improvements, and expounded how the differentiation among subunits affects the overall performance of subunits.The study collected data by survey questionnaire from the manufacturing departments of 22 enterprises which implement information system. We sent 690 questionnaires, and 636 were returned. The valid questionnaires were 581 and the effective rate reached 91.35%. The study analyzed the data by Structure Equation Modeling (SEM), used AMOS software to estimate all fit indices of proposed model, tested the proposed hypothesis and then pointed out the causal relationship and the impact between the variables.The result showed that the differentiation among subunits has remarkable influence on coordination improvements, which is one of the three intermediate benefits, but it doesn't greatly affect task efficiency and data quality as we supposed. Two factors of intermediate benefits, task efficiency and coordination improvements, have remarkable influence on overall performance of subunits, but data quality influences overall performance of subunits mainly by task efficiency and coordination improvements. This is to some extent different from the overseas findings.