AFAM Biennial Conference, 5TH BIENNIAL CONFERENCE - Nigeria 2020

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BEHIND STRATEGIC COMPETITIVENESS: EXPLORING THE ROLE OF EFFECTIVE IMPLEMENTATION OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES IN BANKS
Elham Metwally

Last modified: 2019-08-12

Abstract


Abstract

In the past twenty years, the bulk of money earned in productivity has been related to IT innovations, and more and more organizations perceive information technologies as a better source of strategic competitiveness, and therefore will use it more than others. But, as competition becomes tougher, companies have no choice other than to innovate aggressively, or otherwise to decease, and hereby again comes investments in IT resources. But as innovations diffuse, enhancing productivity, competition becomes even fiercer, bringing another spur of innovation, and raising management’s specific concerns in managing properly their IT innovations.  
This study sheds some light to this issue by investigating the extent to which certain management practices throughout implementation of IT-based technologies has influenced strategic competitiveness for banks in Egypt, by evaluating the implementation of two electronic-based products in two banks in Egypt over the period 1990 to 2005, literally the period around which banks started implementing technology in Egypt. The bank studied has global presence, and evidence extracted from the case study underlined that low-level strategic competitiveness resulted from certain management innovations developed throughout implementation. There were some important undesirable outcomes of the various management practices that counted towards weak financial performance and lower strategic competitiveness levels. Such adverse outcomes could shed some light on what could be the practices to avoid during innovation management. Normally, authors are used to talk about best practices, but exploring worse practices could be useful as well in providing valuable implications and lessons learnt to both academics and management.


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