Empirical Research On Growth Process Of Information Systems Of Chinese Enterprises

The information technology has advanced by leaps and bounds and caused a new Industrial Revolution. Enterprise informationization becomes enterprise's trend in the world. Although Chinese enterprise informationization drops behind western developed countries, it has been developing rapidly with the national strategy of "Through informationization driving industrialization, making the national economic develop by leaps and bounds". But it can be seen that Chinese enterprise informationization dose not balance. Some enterprises information systems integrating SCM, CRM and knowledge management systems, have reached the stage of advanced ERP, which have already syncretized the organization and become the very important part of the core competition capability and bring enterprise so much benefit of economic and society; others are still in the low level and the information system is very unknown to the enterprise. For the organizations and government, know the growth process of Chinese enterprise's information systems and recognize the stages which their information systems are in and how to make the information strategy are always problems puzzled for a long time. The growth theory is a powerful weapon for them to answer these questions.Growth theory of information systems was born in USA, which is one of the fundamental theories in information systems discipline together with system theory. It illustrates the level of maturity of information technology with in an organization through identifying in which stages that organization may position itself. After this theory existing, it has been attached attention by the researchers all over the world and became a popular topic. But because of the difference from times and countries, technology and environment, the studies are also different. Chinese economic is developing so rapidly and it is inosculating to the global economic, in this condition, researching Chinese enterprise information systems growth can not only enrich the fundamental theories in information systems, but also direct the construction of information systems in organizations. The target of this paper is summarizing a general law of the macroscopic growth process of information systems of Chinese enterprises, dividing stages and finding the differences in enterprises from different sizes, industries, ownerships. Based on the classical study of Nolan, we collected related history data of information systems construction by means of an investigation of 353 enterprises in China, and got a general law of the macroscopic growth process of information systems. The results show that the macroscopic information systems growth process of Chinese enterprises presents "S" shape, it reflects the general law of IS growth. But the development trend of IS growth is slow until the late 90's, subsequently becomes fast. It accords with Chinese economy development pace. After correlation analysis, we found that the growth process of information systems is the portrayal true of GDP in China, but there is a lag between them. The information systems of Chinese enterprises will improve in future, the IS expenditures will continual increase largely.It is reasonable that the macroscopic IS growth process of Chinese manufacturing enterprises is divided into five stages. They respectively are: germination stage; initiation stage; diffusion stage; fast development stage; harmonious development stage. According to correlation analysis, we found that the growth process of information systems is the portrayal true of GDP in China, but there is a lag between them. The information systems of Chinese enterprises will improve in future, the IS expenditures will continual increase largely.At last, the paper analyzed the differences from different sizes, industries, ownerships. The growth process of large enterprise, industrial enterprises, state holding enterprises are presented"S"shape. According to the results of analysis, the three factors had effect on the growth process of enterprise information system. The IS of enterprise from different types had different characteristics in the aspects of the time of starting informatization and building LAN and the application field at each stage. According to the analysis, the small enterprises, agricultural enterprises, private enterprises had a good growth trend, will become the main promoting force of information systems growth. The paper studied the growth process of information systems of Chinese enterprises by the investigation and empirical analysis, got the general law of information systems and divided stages, found the differences in the enterprises from different sizes, industries, ownerships. It described completely and correctly the growth process of information systems of Chinese enterprises, met the expected study target.