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Strategic role of IT and its impact on organizations
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INFMAN-2732; No. of Pages 2 Information & Management xxx (2014) xxx–xxx
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Information & Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/im
Editorial
Strategic role of IT and its impact on organizations
Information Technology (IT) is playing a fundamental and key role in almost every business, and has reshaped the basics of business. IT has supported the entire business adaptive and ready for change by connecting people, processes, and information, leading to transformation in the nature of work. This transformation influences everything in organizations, such as organization design, human resource management, process planning, customer relationship management, the development of business and IT strategies, and so on. Unleashing the true strategic potential of IT is one of the most daunting challenges faced by executives in organizations because many factors are involved in transforming strategic potential of IT into realized business benefits. What makes organizations more difficult is the significant impact of IT on business success through the continual change in technologies. Rapid and continual change in technologies diminishes the established competitive advantages of organizations and creates new challenges for organizations. Only organizations that learn how to adopt and use the continually and rapidly changing technologies can be successful. In this sense, the theme of this special issue is ‘‘strategic role of IT and its impact on organizations’’. For this special issue of Information and Management, four research articles from PACIS 2013 are finally selected. PACIS 2013 was held in Jeju Island, Korea, hosted by the Korea Society of Management Information Systems. In total, PACIS 2013 received 583 manuscripts, 441 regular and 142 research-in progress papers, from 38 countries. After a comprehensive reviewing process, a total of 217 regular papers and 52 research-in-progress papers were accepted for the conference. In this process, track chairs in 22 tracks were asked to nominate papers suitable for the theme of this special issue. Twelve papers were nominated by track chairs. All of the nominated papers were thoroughly screened by the editors and carefully reviewed by the editors and reviewers via a blind review process. Each paper was assigned to at least two international referees for the blind review. After three review rounds, four papers were finally accepted. In this way, we did our best to give a thorough scrutiny by IT experts so as to select and publish high quality papers in this special issue. We are delighted to publish the issue and are proud of the excellent papers in this issue. Hopefully this issue will help motivate researchers and practitioners in not only beginning research in this area but also continually engaging in IT impact related research. As we mentioned, this special issue includes four papers. We briefly explain the main theme of each paper in terms of their
motivations and objectives, main foci, and contributions to both researchers and practitioners so as to provide the basic understanding of papers. The first paper, titled ‘‘Do We Order Product Review Information Display? How?’’ by Liqiang Huang, Chuan-Hoo Tan, Weiling Ke and Kwok-Kee Wei, investigates the different presentation impact of online product reviews on customer evaluations. In the situation that product review information on websites increase exponentially, the study tries to look for an effective way to display product review information to improve customer satisfaction. Based on the literature of consumer information processing and two related theories, i.e., schema theory and fit notion, the authors propose a research model and argue that ordered reviews would be more effective than randomly displayed reviews. The results derived from a set of experiments support the argument and provide insight regarding how customers process information and how the different types of review information displayed on websites facilitates customers’ review evaluation. In the second paper, titled ‘‘Developing a Maturity Model for Service Systems in Heavy Equipment Manufacturing Enterprises’’, by Alexander A. Neff, Florian Hamel, Thomas Ph. Herz, Falk Uebernickel, Walter Brenner and Jan vom Brocke, the authors try to develop a maturity model, which is capable of evaluating the IS support of service systems, by identifying key requirements of multinational heavy equipment manufacturing companies. In contrast to the traditional focus of prior studies on customer value, this study focuses mainly on heavy equipment manufacturing firms offering an integrated product-service portfolio. To identify their key requirements and develop an appropriate maturity model, a multiple case study and two focus group workshops with leading firms in the heavy equipment industry were conducted. The finally developed maturity model based on the feedback from the broad range of experts and the exploratory case studies was compared to the dimensions of existing maturity models and then was evaluated from an economic, deployment and epistemological perspectives to assess its usefulness in the industry. The evaluation confirms that the maturity model developed in this study makes a novel and useful contribution to the design of service systems. The third paper, titled ‘‘An Exploratory Study using Electroencephalography (EEG) to Understand Flow Experience in ComputerBased Instruction’’ by Chih-Chien Wang and Ming-Chang Hsu, attempts to identify how balance between challenge and skill leads to superior learning outcomes through improved flow experience. For this purpose, this study examines the relationships among
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2014.05.015 0378-7206/ß 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V.
Please cite this article in press as: J.-N. Lee, B. Choi, Strategic role of IT and its impact on organizations, Inf. Manage. (2014), http:// dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2014.05.015
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INFMAN-2732; No. of Pages 2 2
Editorial / Information & Management xxx (2014) xxx–xxx
challenge-skill balance, flow experience, and learning outcomes in a computer-mediated instruction environment using experimental survey with questionnaire as well as electroencephalography (EEG) recording. The results show challenge-skill balance plays a critical role in enhancing flow experience, which in turn improved learning performance. This study provides a possibility of using brainwaves to understand information systems usage behavior in an efficient way. Although brainwave is receiving attention to explore people’s cognitive response, tools such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for measuring electrophysiological response are not widely adopted due to high cost. This study could be a stepping stone for further research adopted psychophysiological measures such as brainwave recording to discover more unexpected phenomena of information system usage behavior. The special issue ends with the paper, titled ‘‘Can Intra-Firm IT Skills Benefit Inter-Firm Integration and Performance?’’ by Eric T.G. Wang, Frank K.Y. Chou, Neil C.A. Lee and S.Z. Lai, examines how firms’ internal IT skills affect their supply chain performance through enhanced inter-firm collaboration and integration. For this purpose, this study build research model with eight hypotheses based on relational view and human capital theory, and empirically test the model using data collected from 250 Taiwanese manufacturing firms. The results indicate that intrafirm IT skills can benefit inter-firm integration and collaboration, eventually leading to improved supply chain performance. This study contributes to existing knowledge by showing that different IT skills have different effects on boundary-spanning activities. While IT personnel’s hard skills facilitate inter-firm integration, IT personnel’ soft skills affect inter-firm integration indirectly through inter-firm collaboration. This study enhances our understanding on the roles of human skills in the inter-firm setting and calls our attention to human resources policy for IT personnel.
Jae-Nam Lee is a Professor of MIS in the Business School of Korea University in Seoul, Korea. He was formerly on the faculty of the Department of Information Systems at the City University of Hong Kong. He holds MS and Ph.D. degrees in MIS from the Graduate School of Management of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). His research interests are IT outsourcing, knowledge management, information security management, e-commerce, and IT deployment and impacts on organizational performance. His published research articles appear in MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Journal of MIS, Journal of the AIS, Decision Support Systems, Communications of the AIS, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, European Journal of Information Systems, Communications of the ACM, Information & Management, and others. He is currently serving on the editorial board of Journal of the AIS, Pacific Asia Journal of the AIS, and Electronic Commerce Research and Applications. Byounggu Choi is an Associate Professor at the College of Business Administration of the Kookmin University in Seoul, Korea. He was formerly on the faculty of the School of Information Technologies at the University of Sydney. He held his MS and Ph.D. degrees in Management Information Systems from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Seoul. He received his BS degree in Statistics from the Korea University. His research interests are knowledge management, e-commerce, and business value of IT. His papers have been accepted by or published in the Journal of MIS, Journal of the AIS, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Information & Management, and others. He has presented several papers at the ICIS, HICSS, and PACIS Conferences, and serves as an editorial board member of Journal of the AIS and Information & Management.
Jae-Nam Lee* Korea University Business School, Republic of Korea Byounggu Choi College of Business Administration, Kookmin University, Republic of Korea. *Corresponding
author.
Please cite this article in press as: J.-N. Lee, B. Choi, Strategic role of IT and its impact on organizations, Inf. Manage. (2014), http:// dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2014.05.015
INFMAN-2732; No. of Pages 2 Information & Management xxx (2014) xxx–xxx
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Information & Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/im
Editorial
Strategic role of IT and its impact on organizations
Information Technology (IT) is playing a fundamental and key role in almost every business, and has reshaped the basics of business. IT has supported the entire business adaptive and ready for change by connecting people, processes, and information, leading to transformation in the nature of work. This transformation influences everything in organizations, such as organization design, human resource management, process planning, customer relationship management, the development of business and IT strategies, and so on. Unleashing the true strategic potential of IT is one of the most daunting challenges faced by executives in organizations because many factors are involved in transforming strategic potential of IT into realized business benefits. What makes organizations more difficult is the significant impact of IT on business success through the continual change in technologies. Rapid and continual change in technologies diminishes the established competitive advantages of organizations and creates new challenges for organizations. Only organizations that learn how to adopt and use the continually and rapidly changing technologies can be successful. In this sense, the theme of this special issue is ‘‘strategic role of IT and its impact on organizations’’. For this special issue of Information and Management, four research articles from PACIS 2013 are finally selected. PACIS 2013 was held in Jeju Island, Korea, hosted by the Korea Society of Management Information Systems. In total, PACIS 2013 received 583 manuscripts, 441 regular and 142 research-in progress papers, from 38 countries. After a comprehensive reviewing process, a total of 217 regular papers and 52 research-in-progress papers were accepted for the conference. In this process, track chairs in 22 tracks were asked to nominate papers suitable for the theme of this special issue. Twelve papers were nominated by track chairs. All of the nominated papers were thoroughly screened by the editors and carefully reviewed by the editors and reviewers via a blind review process. Each paper was assigned to at least two international referees for the blind review. After three review rounds, four papers were finally accepted. In this way, we did our best to give a thorough scrutiny by IT experts so as to select and publish high quality papers in this special issue. We are delighted to publish the issue and are proud of the excellent papers in this issue. Hopefully this issue will help motivate researchers and practitioners in not only beginning research in this area but also continually engaging in IT impact related research. As we mentioned, this special issue includes four papers. We briefly explain the main theme of each paper in terms of their
motivations and objectives, main foci, and contributions to both researchers and practitioners so as to provide the basic understanding of papers. The first paper, titled ‘‘Do We Order Product Review Information Display? How?’’ by Liqiang Huang, Chuan-Hoo Tan, Weiling Ke and Kwok-Kee Wei, investigates the different presentation impact of online product reviews on customer evaluations. In the situation that product review information on websites increase exponentially, the study tries to look for an effective way to display product review information to improve customer satisfaction. Based on the literature of consumer information processing and two related theories, i.e., schema theory and fit notion, the authors propose a research model and argue that ordered reviews would be more effective than randomly displayed reviews. The results derived from a set of experiments support the argument and provide insight regarding how customers process information and how the different types of review information displayed on websites facilitates customers’ review evaluation. In the second paper, titled ‘‘Developing a Maturity Model for Service Systems in Heavy Equipment Manufacturing Enterprises’’, by Alexander A. Neff, Florian Hamel, Thomas Ph. Herz, Falk Uebernickel, Walter Brenner and Jan vom Brocke, the authors try to develop a maturity model, which is capable of evaluating the IS support of service systems, by identifying key requirements of multinational heavy equipment manufacturing companies. In contrast to the traditional focus of prior studies on customer value, this study focuses mainly on heavy equipment manufacturing firms offering an integrated product-service portfolio. To identify their key requirements and develop an appropriate maturity model, a multiple case study and two focus group workshops with leading firms in the heavy equipment industry were conducted. The finally developed maturity model based on the feedback from the broad range of experts and the exploratory case studies was compared to the dimensions of existing maturity models and then was evaluated from an economic, deployment and epistemological perspectives to assess its usefulness in the industry. The evaluation confirms that the maturity model developed in this study makes a novel and useful contribution to the design of service systems. The third paper, titled ‘‘An Exploratory Study using Electroencephalography (EEG) to Understand Flow Experience in ComputerBased Instruction’’ by Chih-Chien Wang and Ming-Chang Hsu, attempts to identify how balance between challenge and skill leads to superior learning outcomes through improved flow experience. For this purpose, this study examines the relationships among
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2014.05.015 0378-7206/ß 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V.
Please cite this article in press as: J.-N. Lee, B. Choi, Strategic role of IT and its impact on organizations, Inf. Manage. (2014), http:// dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2014.05.015
G Model
INFMAN-2732; No. of Pages 2 2
Editorial / Information & Management xxx (2014) xxx–xxx
challenge-skill balance, flow experience, and learning outcomes in a computer-mediated instruction environment using experimental survey with questionnaire as well as electroencephalography (EEG) recording. The results show challenge-skill balance plays a critical role in enhancing flow experience, which in turn improved learning performance. This study provides a possibility of using brainwaves to understand information systems usage behavior in an efficient way. Although brainwave is receiving attention to explore people’s cognitive response, tools such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for measuring electrophysiological response are not widely adopted due to high cost. This study could be a stepping stone for further research adopted psychophysiological measures such as brainwave recording to discover more unexpected phenomena of information system usage behavior. The special issue ends with the paper, titled ‘‘Can Intra-Firm IT Skills Benefit Inter-Firm Integration and Performance?’’ by Eric T.G. Wang, Frank K.Y. Chou, Neil C.A. Lee and S.Z. Lai, examines how firms’ internal IT skills affect their supply chain performance through enhanced inter-firm collaboration and integration. For this purpose, this study build research model with eight hypotheses based on relational view and human capital theory, and empirically test the model using data collected from 250 Taiwanese manufacturing firms. The results indicate that intrafirm IT skills can benefit inter-firm integration and collaboration, eventually leading to improved supply chain performance. This study contributes to existing knowledge by showing that different IT skills have different effects on boundary-spanning activities. While IT personnel’s hard skills facilitate inter-firm integration, IT personnel’ soft skills affect inter-firm integration indirectly through inter-firm collaboration. This study enhances our understanding on the roles of human skills in the inter-firm setting and calls our attention to human resources policy for IT personnel.
Jae-Nam Lee is a Professor of MIS in the Business School of Korea University in Seoul, Korea. He was formerly on the faculty of the Department of Information Systems at the City University of Hong Kong. He holds MS and Ph.D. degrees in MIS from the Graduate School of Management of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). His research interests are IT outsourcing, knowledge management, information security management, e-commerce, and IT deployment and impacts on organizational performance. His published research articles appear in MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Journal of MIS, Journal of the AIS, Decision Support Systems, Communications of the AIS, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, European Journal of Information Systems, Communications of the ACM, Information & Management, and others. He is currently serving on the editorial board of Journal of the AIS, Pacific Asia Journal of the AIS, and Electronic Commerce Research and Applications. Byounggu Choi is an Associate Professor at the College of Business Administration of the Kookmin University in Seoul, Korea. He was formerly on the faculty of the School of Information Technologies at the University of Sydney. He held his MS and Ph.D. degrees in Management Information Systems from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Seoul. He received his BS degree in Statistics from the Korea University. His research interests are knowledge management, e-commerce, and business value of IT. His papers have been accepted by or published in the Journal of MIS, Journal of the AIS, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Information & Management, and others. He has presented several papers at the ICIS, HICSS, and PACIS Conferences, and serves as an editorial board member of Journal of the AIS and Information & Management.
Jae-Nam Lee* Korea University Business School, Republic of Korea Byounggu Choi College of Business Administration, Kookmin University, Republic of Korea. *Corresponding
author.
Please cite this article in press as: J.-N. Lee, B. Choi, Strategic role of IT and its impact on organizations, Inf. Manage. (2014), http:// dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2014.05.015