Knowledge that Transforms

In this paper, we examine how the competitive industry environment shapes the way that digital strategic posture (defined as a focal firm’s degree of engagement in a particular class of digital business practices relative to the industry norm) influences firms’ realized digital business strategy. We focus on two forms of digital strategy: general IT investment and IT outsourcing investment. Drawing from prior literature on determinants of IT activity and competitive dynamics, we argue that three elements of the industry environment determine whether digital strategic posture has an increasingly convergent or divergent influence on digital business strategy. By divergent influence, we mean an influence that leads to spending substantially more or less on a particular strategic activity than industry norms. We predict that a digital strategic posture (difference from the industry mean) has an increasingly divergent effect on digital business strategy under higher industry turbulence, while having an increasingly convergent effect on digital business strategy under higher industry concentration and higher industry growth. The study uses archival data for 400 U.S.-based firms from 1999 to 2006. Our findings imply that digital business strategy is not solely a matter of optimizing firm operations internally or of responding to one or two focal competitors, but also arises strikingly from awareness and responsiveness to the digital business competitive environment. Collectively, the findings provide insights on how strategic posture and industry environment influence firms’ digital business strategy.

Adapting user interfaces to a user’s cultural background can increase satisfaction, revenue, and market share. Conventional approaches to catering for culture are restricted to adaptations for specific countries and modify only a limited number of interface components, such as the language or date and time formats. We argue that a more comprehensive personalization of interfaces to cultural background is needed to appeal to users in expanding markets. This paper introduces a low-cost, yet efficient method to achieve this goal: cultural adaptivity. Culturally adaptive interfaces are able to adapt their look and feel to suit visual preferences. In a design science approach, we have developed a number of artifacts that support cultural adaptivity, including a prototype web application. We evaluate the efficacy of the prototype’s automatically generated interfaces by comparing them with the preferred interfaces of 105 Rwandan, Swiss, Thai, and multicultural users. The findings demonstrate the feasibility of providing users with interfaces that correspond to their cultural preferences in a novel yet effective manner.

In this paper, we study the differential influence of online user-generated content (UGC), specifically blogs, across the multiple stages of decision making of venture capitalists: screening stage, choice stage, and contract stage. We conjecture that, first, blogs are influential at the screening stage; second, after the screening stage, blogs are noninfluential since decision makers evaluate entities closely at later stages; third, blogs increase the interest from multiple decision makers which in turn increases the cost of the deal for a decision maker. This empirical investigation provides support for the hypotheses, which we tested for funding decisions by venture capitalists in information technology ventures. In particular, this study indicates that blogs can help managers in getting their products/services selected at the screening stage, but, beyond that, blogs do not help directly. However, since more decision makers screen products/services that receive blog coverage, the competition among decision makers helps managers in negotiating better contract terms. We advance the boundary of existing studies on the influence of UGC from single stage process to multiple stages.

Over the last three decades, the prevailing view of information technology strategy has been that it is a functional-level strategy that must be aligned with the firm’s chosen business strategy. Even within this so-called alignment view, business strategy directed IT strategy. During the last decade, the business infrastructure has become digital with increased interconnections among products, processes, and services. Across many firms spanning different industries and sectors, digital technologies (viewed as combinations of information, computing, communication, and connectivity technologies) are fundamentally transforming business strategies, business processes, firm capabilities, products and services, and key interfirm relationships in extended business networks. Accordingly, we argue that the time is right to rethink the role of IT strategy, from that of a functional-level strategy—aligned but essentially always subordinate to business strategy—to one that reflects a fusion between IT strategy and business strategy. This fusion is herein termed digital business strategy. We identify four key themes to guide our thinking on digital business strategy and help provide a framework to define the next generation of insights. The four themes are (1) the scope of digital business strategy, (2) the scale of digital business strategy, (3) the speed of digital business strategy, and (4) the sources of business value creation and capture in digital business strategy. After elaborating on each of these four themes, we discuss the success metrics and potential performance implications from pursuing a digital business strategy. We also show how the papers in the special issue shed light on digital strategies and offer directions to advance insights and shape future research.

Digital artifacts are embedded in wider and constantly shifting ecosystems such that they become increasingly editable, interactive, reprogrammable, and distributable. This state of flux and constant transfiguration renders the value and utility of these artifacts contingent on shifting webs of functional relations with other artifacts across specific contexts and organizations. By the same token, it apportions control over the development and use of these artifacts over a range of dispersed stakeholders and makes their management a complex technical and social undertaking. These ideas are illustrated with reference to (1) provenance and authenticity of digital documents within the overall context of archiving and social memory and (2) the content dynamics occasioned by the findability of content mediated by Internet search engines. We conclude that the steady change and transfiguration of digital artifacts signal a shift of epochal dimensions that calls for rethinking some of the inherited wisdom in IS research and practice.

Recent academic investigations of computer security policy violations have largely focused on non-malicious noncompliance due to poor training, low employee motivation, weak affective commitment, or individual oversight. Established theoretical foundations applied to this domain have related to protection motivation, deterrence, planned behavior, self-efficacy, individual adoption factors, organizational commitment, and other individual cognitive factors. But another class of violation demands greater research emphasis: the intentional commission of computer security policy violation, or insider computer abuse. Whether motivated by greed, disgruntlement, or other psychological processes, this act has the greatest potential for loss and damage to the employer. We argue the focus must include not only the act and its immediate antecedents of intention (to commit computer abuse) and deterrence (of the crime), but also phenomena which temporally precede these areas. Specifically, we assert the need to consider the thought processes of the potential offender and how these are influenced by the organizational context, prior to deterrence. We believe the interplay between thought processes and this context may significantly impact the efficacy of IS security controls, specifically deterrence safeguards. Through this focus, we extend the Straub and Welke (1998) security action cycle framework and propose three areas worthy of empirical investigation—techniques of neutralization (rationalization), expressive/instrumental criminal motivations, and disgruntlement as a result of perceptions of organizational injustice—and propose questions for future research in these areas.

The goal of this study is to augment explanations of how newly implemented technologies enable network change within organizations with an understanding of when such change is likely to happen. Drawing on the emerging literature on technology affordances, the paper suggests that informal network change within interdependent organizational groups is unlikely to occur until users converge on a shared appropriation of the new technology’s features such that the affordances the technology enables are jointly realized. In making the argument for the importance of shared affordances, this paper suggests that group-level network change has its most profound implications at the organization level when individuals use the same subset of a new information technology’s features. To explore this tentative theory, we turn to a comparative, multimethod, longitudinal study of computer-based simulation technology use in automotive engineering. The findings of this explanatory case study show that engineers used the new technology for more than three months, during which time neither group experienced changes to their advice networks. Initially, divergent uses of the technology’s features by engineers in both groups precluded them from being able to coordinate their work in ways that allowed them to structure their advice networks differently. Eventually, engineers in only one of the two groups converged on the use of a common set of the technology’s features to enact a shared affordance. This convergence was necessary to turn the technology into a resource that could collectively afford group members the ability to compare their simulation outputs with one another and, in so doing, alter the content and structure of the group’s advice network. The implications of these findings for the literatures on technology feature use, affordances, social networks, and post-adoption behaviors in organizations are discussed.

Herd literature suggests that people tend to discount their own beliefs and imitate others when making adoption decisions and that the resulting adoption decisions are fragile and can be easily reversed during the post-adoptive stage. This helps explain why the adoption of a number of new technologies―from Amazon’s Kindle, to Apple’s iPod, iPhone, and iPad, to various types of Web 2. 0 technologies―appears to have adoption patterns similar to those of new fashion trends (i. e., an initial en masse acquisition followed by subsequent abandonment). It is important to understand these phenomena because they are strongly related to the staying power of technology. From a herd behavior perspective, this study proposes two new concepts, namely discounting one’s own information and imitating others, to describe herd behavior in technology adoption. A research model is developed to describe the conditions under which herd behavior in technology adoption occurs, how it impacts technology adoption decision making, and how it influences post-adoptive system use. A longitudinal study is conducted to examine the research model. Findings from this research suggest that the discounting of one’s own beliefs and the imitating of others when adopting a new technology are provoked primarily by the observation of prior adoptions and perceptions of uncertainty regarding the adoption of new technology. Herd behavior has a significant influence on user technology adoption; however, it does not necessarily lead to the collapse of the user base, as predicted in the herd literature. Instead, imitation can help reduce post-adoption regret and thus serve as a legitimate strategy for choosing a good enough technology, which may or may not be the best option to enhance job performance. People tend to adjust their beliefs when herding and also to revive their discounted initial beliefs to modify their beliefs about the technology at the post-adoptive stage. Findings from this study have significant research and practical implications.

Enterprise system implementations often create tension in organizations. On the one hand, these systems can provide significant operational and strategic benefits. On the other hand, implementation of these systems is risky and a source of major disruptions. In particular, employees experience significant changes in their work environment during an implementation. Although the relationship between ES implementations and employees’ jobs has been noted in prior research, there is limited research on the nature, extent, determinants, and outcomes of changes in employees’ job characteristics following an ES implementation. This paper develops and tests a model, termed the job characteristics change model (JCCM), that posits that employees will experience substantial changes in two job characteristics (i.e., job demands and job control) during the shakedown phase (i.e., immediately after the rollout) of an ES implementation. These changes are theorized to be predicted by work process characteristics, namely perceived process complexity, perceived process rigidity, and perceived process radicalness, that in turn will be influenced by technology characteristics (i.e., perceived technology complexity, perceived technology reconfigurability, and perceived technology customization). JCCM further posits that changes in job characteristics will influence employees’ job satisfaction. Longitudinal field studies conducted in two organizations (N = 281 and 141 respectively) provided support for the model. The scientific and practical implications of the findings are discussed.