Relations of enterprise's IT resources, IT capability and sustainable competitive advantage: An empirical study

Abstract

Enterprise's IT capability has attracted more and more attention from the academic circles and corporate circles, but whether IT resources can promote enterprise performance and its effect mechanism have not been theoretically clarified. Based on resource-based view, this essay considers enterprise's capabilities of configuring and optimizing IT resources as the source of its IT-based sustained competitive advantage. Taking Chinese enterprises as the objects, it constructs the structural equation model for an empirical test. As shown in this study, IT infrastructure cannot form IT capabilities independently along with the gradual popularization and commercialization of IT technologies; the study verifies that IT capabilities can affect enterprise performance through two mediator variables, namely, “IT strategic alignment” and “IT support for core competencies” it is also discovered in this study that, compared with “IT strategic alignment”, enterprise performance is more frequently construed as “IT support for core competencies”. In the end, the future study on enterprise's IT capabilities is discussed.