Research On Organizational Information Technology Assimilation Models

With the deepening of informationization,an increasing number of organizations are investing a large proportion of their expenditures into IT.However,because the outcomes of IT assimilation are uncertain and dynamic,the failure rate of IT projects is high,IT investment is unable to bring competitive advantages for organizations.An effective approach to achieving business value from IT projects after organizations make investments into IT is to enhance IT assimilation.Given that IT assimilation is important,the question of how to employ organizational and IT factors,particularly top management support and IT resources to enhance information technology assimilation has attracted the attention of researchers and practitioners in the area of information systems.While previous studies have examined the relationship between top management support,IT resource and IT assimilation,little is known on how top management support and IT resource affect IT assimilation.In addition,the findings about the relationship between top management support,IT resource and IT assimilation are inconsistent.Meanwhile,few studies integrate top management support with IT resource to explore the IT assimilation process.Thus,how top management support and IT resource affect IT assimilation requires further examination.We thereby attempt to build an top management support and IT resource enabled organizational IT assimilation framework as well as three sub-models.Based on a multi-industry survey,we also conduct an analysis of quantitative data to test the effectiveness of the above framework.First,by introducing upper echelons theory,we argue that an critical type of top management support,CEO support to IT will impact IT use for competitive advantage which reflects the overall evaluation of IT assimilation,and this process is mediated by IT infrastructure and IT human resources.Our results reveal that the relationship between CEO support to IT and IT use for competitive advantage is partly mediated by IT human resource.Second,by introducing the theory of IT value creation process,we built a model of IT infrastructure and IT enabled IT assimilation.Our results found that IT infrastructure resource has a positive effect on IT management capability other than IT assimilation,while IT human resource has both indirect and direct effects on IT assimilation.Meanwhile,this research model also examined the nonlinearities between IT resource and CEO support to IT in the IT assimilation process.Finally,we examined the effects of IT reconfiguration and IT integration.Further,we examined the effects of two dimensions of a IT strategy:balancing(remaining a close match between IT reconfiguration and IT integration)and complementing(remaining synergy between IT reconfiguration and IT integration).Our results indicated that the balancing dimension and the complementing dimension had a positive effect on IT use for competitive advantage.Considering that IT use for competitive advantage is used to evaluate IT assimilation,our findings contribute to the enhancement of IT assimilation by developing a better IT strategy.