IT Flexibility Research Articles

Guest editorial for the special section on “Technology acceptance, usage, and competitive advantage”

A central question in the strategic management literature is one of how organizations achieve and maintain sustainable competitive advantage. While scholars in this area have explored this issue from many different perspectives, our understanding of the relationship between technology acceptance, usage, and competitive advantage is still incomplete. The papers in this special section (some of which were originally presented in a session on this topic in INFORMS 2008) focus on this issue. They present studies situated in an international context, underscoring the importance of technology to competitive advantage across different national contexts. They examine a rich array of technologies or technological infrastructures that have a bearing on the success of individuals and organizations, pointing to the complex relationship between technology and business outcomes. We present a brief summary of the papers below. The study “From IT deployment capabilities to competitive advantage: An exploratory study in China” by Jun Tian, Kanliang Wang, Yan Chen, and Bjorn Johansson uses a survey of Chinese firms to examine how organizations can deploy acquired information technologies to support and shape business strategies and value chain activities. The paper identifies three building blocks of IT deployment, namely strategic IT flexibility, business—IT partnership, and business—IT alignment, and empirically examines how these three constructs directly or indirectly influence competitive advantage. The study “ICT infrastructure for innovation” by Bendik Bygstad builds on a case study of the Norwegian company, Norwegian Corp., to examine how the concept of an enterprise service bus, applied at different levels, can provide insights into the innovation process both within and across different business units of an organization. The study illustrates how technologies can influence the development of organizational structures. The study “Knowledge management technology for organized crime assessment” by Petter Gottschalk presents a knowledge management technology stage model. This study examines how police organizations use information and communication technologies in intelligence and investigative work, and highlights the challenges these organizations face in applying and using new technologies to improve their functioning. The study “Successful and unsuccessful multicommunication episodes: Engaging in dialogue or juggling messages?” by JeanineW. Turner and N. L. Reinsch uses a critical incident technique to explore multicommunicating by individuals. Turner and Reinsch define multicommunicating as the act of engaging in more than one conversation at a time, and find that some technology pairings appear more conducive to multicommunicating than others. The respondents in their study provide a number of reasons why some episodes of multicommunicating are successful while others are not. D. Rau (*) :W. Zheng Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL, USA e-mail: drau@niu.edu

Resource or Capability? A Dissection of SMEs' it Infrastructure Flexibility and its Relationship with it Responsiveness

For SMEs, responsiveness to change is a critical survival capability. Practitioners believe that IT infrastructure flexibility contributes to responsiveness, yet empirical evidence is sparse. The purpose of this research is to empirically test the relationship between IT infrastructure flexibility, as measured on four dimensions, and IT responsiveness in SMEs context. Two research questions are answered by this study: first, does IT infrastructure flexibility help achieve IT responsiveness, and second, does each IT flexibility dimension affect IT responsiveness directly or indirectly. According to the resource-based theory, we speculate that, of the four IT flexibility dimensions, connectivity, compatibility, modularity, and IT personnel competency, only the latter two have a direct impact on IT responsiveness. Industrial data was collected from 233 SMEs and analyzed using PLS. The results confirm the positive relationship between IT infrastructure flexibility and IT responsiveness. The findings also provide evidence that the impact of connectivity and compatibility on IT responsiveness is fully mediated by modularity and IT personnel competency, which in turn affect IT responsiveness directly. The academic and practical implications of such findings are discussed.

SOA Implementation Challenges for Medium Sized Corporations

In the commercial world, SOA implementation practitioners are finding a gulf between tools, whether vendor-based or open source, and the practical first needs of customers. Future-facing tool developers are addressing problems of orchestration to achieve the SOA promise. Most corporations, however, have not yet established either the services to be abstracted, or the governance requirements around exposing those services, such as the right level of service granularity. This case study is based on recent experience in the utility and retail sectors. The drivers for each are compelling: a business-driven need for IT flexibility. Examples are provided to show that customers in both sectors need to develop their architecture and governance before attempting to choose the right tools. Confusion also exists between tools and off-the-shelf solutions in the SOA environment. The challenge of agile approach for SOA development is also examined.

From IT deployment capabilities to competitive advantage: An exploratory study in China

As more and more companies are deploying, or plan to deploy, information systems, the organizational capabilities to effectively deploy information technologies to support and shape businesses become increasingly important. While many studies have focused on how to acquire state-of-the-art information technologies and on how to effectively utilize implemented information technologies, more studies are still needed to investigate how a company can successfully deploy acquired information technologies to support and shape businesses strategies and value chain activities. IT deployment capabilities are defined as the organizational capabilities to configure and reconfigure a company's information system by adding new IT components or by adapting the existing information systems in order to make the whole information system available to support and shape businesses. This study identifies and investigates the three building blocks of IT deployment capabilities: strategic IT flexibility, business---IT partnership, and business---IT alignment. Using the resource-based view, we propose a framework to explain the relationship between IT deployment capabilities and competitive advantage. The research model is tested on data collected in China. Results show that strategic IT flexibility and business---IT partnership have direct impacts on competitive advantage, while business---IT alignment has an indirect impact on competitive advantage. The effect of business---IT alignment on competitive advantage is fully mediated by strategic IT flexibility and business---IT partnership. The results provide support for the relationship between IT deployment capabilities and competitive advantage. The study presents implications for how to develop IT deployment capabilities and how to generate business value from IT investment.

Stuck in the Middle: Overcoming Strategic Complexity through IT Flexibility

Firms have reacted to a recent surge in environmental volatility by turning to mixed business strategies as a way to protect their existing markets and to establish new markets. Rather than choose a single focus for their strategy, these firms pursue operational excellence, customer intimacy, and product leadership at the same time. Research shows that mixed strategies — a characteristic of so-called stuck in the middle firms — lead to lower firm performance than single or pure-strategies. Mindful of the potentially conflicting goals and complexities found in firms with mixed strategies, in this paper, we assess the role of IT flexibility in helping firms to overcome such complexity and to ultimately thrive in a volatile environment that calls for increasingly mixed strategies. Using data from matched surveys of executives in 241 firms, we reveal that IT flexibility (hardware compatibility, software modularity, and network connectivity) is highest in mixed strategy firms and that such firms predominate in volatile settings where flexible IT is more apt to provide the means of responding to sudden or unexpected market change. These findings help explain why mixed strategy firms have higher IT business value than pure strategy firms, a result noted in prior research. For firms trying to prosper under mixed strategies, our results confirm the importance of IT flexibility and the broader implications of using IT to pursue multiple strategic goals, as defines stuck in the middle firms.

Who Took the Cookie from the Cookie Jar?

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) continues to entice enterprises by promising flexibility, agility and alignment of IT with business objectives; along with the ever elusive advantages of increased reuse, better security, control over integration expenditures, and reduced IT maintenance costs. However, as we have learned over the last two decades achieving these benefits has more to do with behaviors, policies and procedures rather than the quality of the strategy, architecture or code.

Estimating and Costing in Advanced System Engineering Environments

An organisation may require estimates for a variety of reasons. Accurate and timely estimating enhances competitiveness in business and also promotes an image for the organisation of excellence in business practice. The need to satisfy these requirements quicker and better means that existing skills must be used more efficiently. This can be done by using the power and flexibility of IT. The authors reviews the major limitations in costing and estimating tools and inform the international community of the work being done in this field by the principal directorate of technical costs (PDTC) in the ATMOSPHERE project. This project is part of the second phase of the european strategic programme for research and development in information technology (ESPRIT II). Its purpose is to develop and exploit standardised facilities in support of system engineering environment (ASEE). This will lead to an improvement in both productivity and quality in industrial system engineering.