THE FORMATION AND VALUE OF IT-ENABLED RESOURCES: ANTECEDENTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF SYNERGISTIC RELATIONSHIPS
This paper informs the literature on the business value of information technology by conceptualizing a path from IT assets-that is, commodity-like or off-the-shelf information technologies-to, sustainable competitive advantage. This path suggests that IT assets can play a strategic role when they are combined with organizational resources to create IT-enabled resources. To the extent that relationships between IT assets and organizational resources are synergistic, the ensuing IT-enabled resources are capable of positively affecting firms' sustainable competitive advantage via their improved strategic potential. This is an important contribution since IT-related organizational benefits have been hard to demonstrate despite attempts to study them through a variety of methods and theoretical lenses. This paper synthesizes systems theory and the resource-based view of the firm to build a unified conceptual model linking IT assets with firm-level benefits. Several propositions are derived from the model and their implications for IS research and practice are discussed.
it-enabled resources strategic potential systems theory resource-based view of the firm business value of it emergent capabilities synergy compatibility integration effort