Agile software development, a paradigm that emphasizes project team autonomy and the value of responding to changes over following standardized processes, has gained prominence in the software industry. Prior investigations on the adoptions of agile paradigms for software operations and their performance implications have typically focused on isolated aspects of software development processes. In this study, we adopt a configurational perspective of software operations and assess the causal impacts of adopting an organizational policy that grants higher levels of autonomy to project teams. Building on the equifinality framework proposed in organizational studies, we posit that an organizational policy that provides higher levels of autonomy for software teams engenders performance-enhancing adaptations through agile reconfigurations of project operations. To test our hypothesis, we collaborated with a commercial software firm and collected data from a policy experiment at the firm. We examined project-level data spanning a four-year observation period during which the firm implemented a new policy that significantly reduced the hurdles for project teams to autonomously reconfigure their operations. The results support our postulation and shed light on how an organizational policy that provides greater autonomy to software teams for designing their context-specific project configurations can improve project performance.

Do information technology investments improve firm profitability? If so, is this effect because such investments help improve sales, or is it because they help reduce overall operating expenses? How does the effect of IT on profitability compare with that of advertising and of research and development? These are important questions because investments in IT constitute a large part of firms’ discretionary expenditures, and managers need to understand the likely impacts and mechanisms to justify and realize value from their IT and related resource allocation processes. The empirical evidence in this paper, derived using archival data from 1998 to 2003 for more than 400 global firms, suggests that IT has a positive impact on profitability. Importantly, the effect of IT investments on sales and profitability is higher than that of other discretionary investments, such as advertising and R&D. A significant portion of the impact of IT on firm profitability is accounted for by IT-enabled revenue growth, but there is no evidence for the effect of IT on profitability through operating cost reduction. Taken together, these findings suggest that firms have had greater success in achieving higher profitability through IT-enabled revenue growth than through IT-enabled cost reduction. They also provide important implications for managers to make allocations among discretionary expenditures such as IT, advertising, and R&D. With regard to IT expenditures, the results imply that firms should accord higher priority to IT projects that have revenue growth potential over those that focus mainly on cost savings.

Introduction to Special Issue: The Role of Information Systems and Analytics in Chronic Disease Prevention and Management

Information systems researchers have drawn on the resource-based view (RBV) and dynamic capabilities theory to offer a sharper theoretical lens to study the impact of information technology (IT) enabled capabilities on organizational performance. In this study, we propose a new conceptualization of IT-enabled production capability, based on the ability of a manufacturing plant to use its mix of resource inputs to maximize its process outputs. Our approach extends the literature on firm capability using data envelopment analysis (DEA), a nonparametric approach for estimating relative efficiencies of decision-making units. We tested our models using plant-level data collected from a sample of U.S. plants. Our study makes a key contribution by developing a new methodology to measure IT business value with respect to the role of IT-enabled production capability. We operationalize a new DEA-based measure of capability using the relative efficiency of converting plant inputs into process outputs, a significant departure from extant research that has primarily focused on subjective and absolute measures to conceptualize capability.

Recent healthcare reform has focused on reducing excessive waste in the U.S. healthcare system, with duplicate testing being one of the main culprits. We explore the factors associated with duplicate tests when patients utilize healthcare services from multiple providers, and yet information sharing across these providers is fragmented. We hypothesize that implementation of health information sharing technologies will reduce the duplication rate more for radiology tests compared to laboratory tests, especially when health information sharing technologies are implemented across disparate provider organizations. We utilize a unique panel data set consisting of 39,600 patient visits from 2005 to 2012, across outpatient clinics of 68 hospitals, to test our hypotheses. We apply a quasi-experimental approach to investigate the impact of health information sharing technologies on the duplicate testing rate. Our results indicate that usage of information sharing technologies across health organizations is associated with lower duplication rates, and the extent of reduction in duplicate tests is more pronounced among radiology tests compared to laboratory tests. Our results support the need for implementation of health information exchanges as a potential solution to reduce the incidence of duplicate tests.

Hospitalization of patients with chronic diseases poses a significant burden on the healthcare system. Frequent hospitalization can be partially attributed to the failure of healthcare providers to engage effectively with their patients. Recently, patient portals have become popular as information technology (IT) platforms that provide patients with online access to their medical records and help them engage effectively with healthcare providers. Despite the popularity of these portals, there is a paucity of research on the impact of patient–provider engagement on patients’ health outcomes. Drawing on the theory of effective use, we examine the association between portal use and the incidence of subsequent patient hospitalizations, based on a unique, longitudinal dataset of patients’ portal use, across a 12-year period at a large academic medical center in North Texas. Our results indicate that portal use is associated with improvements in patient health outcomes along multiple dimensions, including the frequency of hospital and emergency visits, readmission risk, and length of stay. This is one of the first studies to conduct a large-scale, longitudinal analysis of a health IT system and its effect on individual-level health outcomes. Our results highlight the need for technologies that can improve patient–provider engagement and improve overall health outcomes for chronic disease management.