ماندانا طاهری

Achieving business-IT alignment is one of the main purposes and also challenges of organizations. Many studies have indicated the importance of aligning information systems (IS) function with other business functions. The main purpose of this survey is evaluating business-IT alignment focusing on social and technical dimensions of business-IT alignment in Bank Mellat. The data was collected through a questionnaire which was designed based on Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and also the models provided by Reich and Benbasat (2000), and Lee et al. (2008). By using three questionnaires, the status of social and technical dimensions of business-IT alignment has been investigated under 3 groups of questions: (a) Business-IT strategic planning alignment; (b) Business-IT processes, organization and relationships, and (c) Managing IT human resources and training users. The collected data was analyzed by applying one-tailed T-Test, ANOVA and Tukey-Kramer post- test. The results of analysis show that the status of all technical indicators was at ‘Defined’ stage, while there was some weakness in social dimension of business-IT alignment. Also, the overall results show that the status of business-IT alignment regarding all of the three mentioned dimensions is at ‘Defined’ stage. A comparative analysis of the results that has focused on the perceptions of different sample respondent groups show significant differences between the perceptions of external auditors who believe in ‘Repeatable’ level of business-IT alignment and other respondent groups who believe in ‘Defined’ level of business-IT alignment toward all three mentioned dimensions. JEL Classification: C12, C18, D1, D21, D22, D73

  One of the main problems of SMEs is how to finance their investments. The role of banks in this regard is crucial, since they can be a type of sources of financing through lending credits directly to SMEs. The key role of the paper thus relies on analyzing the effect of SMEs financing by the Iranian banking system.   The objective of this paper is to determine the influence of loans demanded by the SMEs on finance performance of the various Iranian banks. In addition, it studies the role of other important characters related to lending, bank efficiency, and economic performance in finance to SMEs through the banking system.   It is motivated by the hypothesis that macroeconomic-cyclical indicators and bank-specific variables influence the nonperforming loans in the banking system. This is carried out by an application to a logit model. Our findings indicate that several variables have significant effects on nonperforming loans in the Iranian banking system . Return of asset, equity return, SME loan to total loan ratio, inflation, current asset to current liabilities ratio, total SMEs€™ loans to total liabilities ratio and total SMEs€™ loans to total assets ratio have the pronounced significant impacts on nonperforming loans of the Iranian banking . The coefficient of loans to SMEs is significantly positive, which implies that a loan to SMEs increases nonperforming loans method while raising risks to the banking system. JEL Classification: C35, D22, E51