2013/03/26 by Yang Chen, Yi Wang, Saggi Nevo +4 · 2 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · #Collaboration in agile enterprises #Information Technology Governance and Strategy #Innovation and Knowledge Management
paper · doi:10.1057/ejis.2013.4
openalex publication_date 2013/03/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
The business value of information technology (IT) has been one of the top concerns of both practitioners and scholars for decades. Numerous studies have documented the positive effects of IT capability on organizational performance but our knowledge of the processes through which such gains are achieved remains limited due to a lack of focus on the business environment. Such a linkage therefore remains the subject of debate in the information systems literature. In this study, we fill this gap by investigating the mediating role of business process agility and the moderating roles of environmental factors. On the basis of matched survey data obtained from 214 IT and business executives from manufacturing firms in China, our analyses show that even though firm-wide IT capability presents the characteristics of rarity, appropriability, non-reproducibility, and non-substitutability, its impact on organizational performance is fully mediated by business process agility. Our results also show that the impact of the environment is multifaceted and nuanced. In particular, environmental hostility weakens the effect of IT capability on business process agility, while environmental complexity strengthens it. The theoretical and practical implications of this study, and its limitations, are also discussed.