Introduction

The main research objective of this book is to investigate how organizations can realize the intended business benefits from IT standardization. In order to investigate this, we will also study what this standardization process entails and how the usage of the resulting standards impacts business performance. Although ultimately the interest lies in the business performance effectiveness and efficiency, for practical reasons, the focus of this study will be on its intermediate level: the performance of business processes. The justification for carrying out this research, on how to ensure effective and efficient IT standardization and IT standard usage in a company, stems from the fact that this phenomenon has hardly been investigated in the academic literature and that results are not well understood in everyday practice. A globally operating financial services enterprise, FINCORP, will be used as a case company.