The impact of compatibility & complementarity between information technology assets and organizational resources on firm performance

This thesis informs the literature on the business value of IT by demonstrating that commodity-like information technologies can become strategic assets when integrated with compatible and complementary organizational resources to create IT-enabled resources. This is an important contribution since IT-related organizational benefits remain elusive despite attempts to study them using a variety of methods and applying different theoretical lenses.;The thesis further extends the RBV by demonstrating that certain types of IS resources become more strategic under uncertainty, eliciting additional business value from IT assets.;These outcomes are the result of building and testing a model that synthesizes the RBV with systems theory. The integrated model links IT assets to sustainable organizational benefits by including organizational resources as intermediaries.;The model's key variables were operationalized and rigorously validated through several rounds of instrument development. The outcome is eight new scales with adequate psychometric properties.;Another contribution of this thesis is an operationalization of organizational resources' attributes which according to the resource-based view of the firm (RBV), represent resources' strategic value. An extensive literature review did not discover other valid and reliable scales for these important constructs.;The conceptual model was tested using data collected from managers of customer service departments who recently implemented an information technology. The data provide support for the hypotheses concerning the manner in which IT assets exert their business value. Data analysis was conducted using two statistical methods that provided similar results, suggesting a useful and robust model for assessing the business value of IT.;In summary, the main theoretical result of this thesis is that both complementarity and compatibility between IT assets and organizational resources are important when evaluating IT investments. Compatibility is useful when trying to answer the question: can an IT asset and an organizational resource be combined? Complementarity is useful when trying to answer the question: should an IT asset and an organizational resource be combined?.;The findings of this thesis are also of practical relevance to managers since they provide them with tools for evaluating the business value of IT assets which they purchase using their organizations' scarce financial resources.