Journal of Strategic Information Systems最新文献

This paper provides an assessing review and agenda for research at the ‘nexus’ between information systems and strategy practice. The review aims to understand the nature of this connection between the two areas, where information systems scholars strive to understand the everyday work of practitioners in organisations and the impact of digital technologies in strategizing, whilst strategy practice scholars seek a greater understanding of such technologies and their use by strategists. Despite a developing body of work relevant to both information systems and strategy practice, and several editorials calling for ‘synergy’, we still collectively know little about the state of knowledge at the nexus. To address this, our review identifies several constructs that provide linkages between information systems and strategy practice to reveal more about the current state of knowledge and to develop a formal definition for a domain which we call digital strategizing. We conclude by outlining an agenda to encourage and accelerate future research on digital strategizing.

Competition in the Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry is increasingly moving from being motivated by cost savings towards strategic benefits that service providers can offer to their clients. Innovation is one such benefit that is expected nowadays in outsourcing engagements. The rising importance of innovation has been noticed and acknowledged not only in the Information Systems (IS) literature, but also in other management streams such as innovation and strategy. However, to date, these individual strands of research remain largely isolated from each other. Our theoretical review addresses this gap by consolidating and analyzing research on strategic innovation in the ITO and BPO context. The article set includes 95 papers published between 1998 and 2020 in outlets from the IS and related management fields. We craft a four-phase framework that integrates prior insights about (1) the antecedents of the decision to pursue strategic innovation in outsourcing settings; (2) arrangement options that facilitate strategic innovation in outsourcing relationships; (3) the generation of strategic innovations; and (4) realized strategic innovation outcomes, as assessed in the literature. We find that the research landscape to date is skewed, with many studies focusing on the first two phases. The last two phases remain relatively uncharted. We also discuss how innovation-oriented outsourcing insights compare with established research on cost-oriented outsourcing engagements. Finally, we offer directions for future research.

Many organizations run their core business operations on decades-old legacy IT systems. Some security professionals argue that legacy IT systems significantly increase security risks because they are not designed to address contemporary cybersecurity risks. Others counter that the legacy systems might be “secure by antiquity” and argue that due to lack of adequate documentation on the systems, it is very difficult for potential attackers to discover and exploit security vulnerabilities. There is a shortage of empirical evidence on either argument. Routine activity theory (RAT) argues that an organization’s guardianship is critical for reducing security incidents. However, RAT does not well explain how organizations might guard against security risks of legacy IT systems. We theorize that organizations can enhance their guardianship by either modernizing their legacy IT systems in-house or by outsourcing them to cloud vendors. With datasets from the U.S. federal agencies, we find that agencies that have more legacy IT systems experience more frequent security incidents than others with more modern IT systems. A 1%-point increase in the proportion of IT budgets spent on IT modernization is associated with a 5.6% decrease in the number of security incidents. Furthermore, migration of the legacy systems to the cloud is negatively associated with the number of security incidents. The findings advance the literature on strategic information systems by extending RAT to explain why the “security by antiquity” argument is not valid and how organizations can reduce the security risks of legacy IT systems through modernization and migration to the cloud.

The rise of big data and the fluid boundaries of digital products are driving companies to use business analytics (BA) to power their customer involvement. The complementarity view offers unique competence to generate value from BA because capability complementarity is less likely to be replicated or imitated. Unlike prior studies on BA-enabled value realization, our research investigates the interactions of BA and customer involvement capabilities using the complementarity view. We tested our model using data collected from 317 IT companies in China. Our results suggest that BA value realization requires both a top-down mechanism in which BA skills provide global guidance for alignment with a company’s goals and a bottom-up mechanism in which BA culture empowers local autonomy for adaptation to ever-changing needs. Our BA-complemented mechanisms provide research and practice with a way to concurrently use BA and customer involvement capabilities to address the duality of digital innovation. We further suggest that BA skills are necessary but insufficient for digital innovation because BA culture demonstrates a stronger effect in complementing organizations’ existing capabilities than BA skills do.

With business ecosystems digitalizing by the force of digital innovation, the deployment of boundary resources (such as application programming interfaces: APIs) becomes a strategic option across contexts. We distinguish between boundary resources that provide access openness and those that provide resource openness, and theorize the antecedents and consequences of their deployment. Employing panel data regressions to a longitudinal cross-industry dataset, we find that the digital knowledge base of the focal firm and the existence of potential digital complementors drive boundary resource deployment. Such deployment benefits firm performance depending on the firm’s market power. From our empirical analysis, we reveal a differentiated perspective on the quality of the confined openness provided by boundary resources as well as the embeddedness of their deployment in the rationales and motivations of the associated actors in digital business ecosystems. We complement the existent theoretical framework on boundary resources and provide valuable insights to managers reflecting about deploying boundary resources in a beneficial way.

Building on the concept of dynamic managerial capabilities, we set out to advance scholarly understanding of the antecedents of the presence of technology leadership in the form of the chief information officer (CIO) in the top management team. We derive a holistic framework from the literature of dynamic capabilities and introduce into that literature the concept of adaptation pressures. We suggest that external and internal dimensions that pertain to information technology, comprising an environmental, structural, and strategic dimension, intensify the pressure on a firm to adapt. The pressure to adapt increases the likelihood that the firm will add a CIO to its top management team. In turn, the presence of a CIO can direct a firm toward exploration as a way to relieve the adaptation pressure. Results from regression analyses of a longitudinal data set covering 503 large U.S. firms from 2006 to 2017 confirm our hypotheses. This study contributes to the literature of both information systems and strategy by clarifying the antecedents of technology leadership in the C-suite and explicating how environmental, structural, and strategic factors can act as such antecedents. Moreover, this study reinforces the notion that IT leadership can induce strategic change.

Digital platforms for knowledge work (DPKW), such as Upwork, Freelancer, and Fiverr, connect clients with millions of workers for a range of knowledge work services, including app development, graphic design, and data analytics. Research on this emergent phenomenon has recently gained traction in terms of publication volume and research diversity. Focusing on the contributions of information systems research, we conducted a literature review to distinguish papers on DPKW from related types of digital platforms, to synthesize what we know about knowledge work on DPKW, and to guide future research. Based on a comprehensive literature search, we derived five boundary conditions, which constitute our definition of DPKW: digitality, value network paradigm, centralized governance, contractual work, and knowledge work. We further developed a conceptual process framework of the constituent processes of DPKW. With this framework, we elaborate on an established process model to distinguish the three macro­level processes of matching, contracting, and executing. We further examined micro­level processes suggested in extant research based on a process linking approach in order to understand how they synchronically instantiate each macro­level process. Emphasizing the significance of the micro­ and macro­level processes and the emergent stage of the literature on DPKW, we offer an agenda for future research and outline implications for practice.

Research on the role of social media in crisis management has led to a deeper understanding of their affordances. This research, however, is fragmented, with a primary focus on crisis response. We lack a clear conceptualization of the affordances that social media offer by learning from them to prepare strategically for crises. Based on a systematic review of 128 papers, we inductively build a framework of social media affordances for organizational learning in crisis management. We discuss their role and interplay in strategic crisis management, focusing on organizational crisis learning, and outline avenues for future research based on this foundation.