There was, however, very little support for Hypothesis 3, which proposed a relationship between owner/manager commitment and AIS alignment. Commitment was measured based on the level of the owner/manager’s participation in IT projects. Only participation in the problem solving stage was found to be significantly greater
in the aligned firms than the not-aligned group. This rather unexpected result could be explained by Jarvenpaa &
Ives’ (1991, p.206) who found ‘executive involvement’ (or the degree of importance placed on IT by the managers) was more important than ‘executive participation’ (or managers substantive interventions). Therefore,as argued by Hussin et al. (2002), possessing good knowledge of accounting and IT could fit into this concept of ‘involvement’ because this knowledge would help an owner/manager (probably with the help of external
experts) to decide on the right software to support information needs and thus make alignment more likely