Social dimension

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

The study of the resilience of the cities against earthquake is one of the necessities for the reduction of losses and death toll of the earthquakes. Resilience has various definitions and there is not a unique comprehensive model for its quantitative assessment. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive quantitative indicator for resilience and to study the efficacy of social and governance strategies in improvement of urban resilience against earthquake. To achieve this aim, first effective dimensions and indices of resilience of urban areas were explored and extracted by reviewing available research studies and experts elicitation method. Then based on experts’ opinions and pairwise comparison the model was justified and the relative weights for dimensions and indices were obtained and a comprehensive overall resilience index was introduced. Using the proposed index, the efficacy of different social and governance strategies were compared considering three different earthquake scenarios of North-Tehran, Ray fault, and floating faults. The comparisons were based on three metrics i.e. absolute value of resilience increase, distance from the origin of the Pareto chart considering implementation duration time and costs, and the ratio of cost to resilience increase. In this regard, strategy S3 (90 percent increase of social resilience), strategy S1 (10 percent increase of social resilience) and strategy S3 were the optimal ones based on the first, second and third metrics, respectively. On the whole, the social strategies had better efficiency than the governance ones, but it seems in practice the social and governance strategy categories must be implemented in an integrated manner which could be considered as a future research proposal.