Computing and organizations: what we know and what we don't know
Communications of the ACM - Special section on management of information systems
In the age of the smart machine: the future of work and power
In the age of the smart machine: the future of work and power
The substitution of information technology for other factors of production: a Firm Level Analysis
Management Science - Special issue: Frontier research on information systems and economics
Sense and Respond: Capturing Value in the Network Era
Sense and Respond: Capturing Value in the Network Era
Information technology and economic performance: A critical review of the empirical evidence
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
Product Development Decisions: A Review of the Literature
Management Science
Information Technology and Productivity: Evidence from Country-Level Data
Management Science
Information technology and internal firm organization: an exploratory analysis
Journal of Management Information Systems - Special section: Strategic and competitive information systems
Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning
Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning
Mobile phone customer retention strategies and Chinese e-commerce
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
Hi-index | 0.01 |
We gather detailed data on organizational practices and information technology (IT) use at 253 firms to examine the hypothesis that external focus---the ability of a firm to detect and therefore respond to changes in its external operating environment---increases returns to IT, especially when combined with decentralized decision making. First, using survey-based measures, we find that external focus is correlated with both organizational decentralization, and IT investment. Second, we find that a cluster of practices including external focus, decentralization, and IT is associated with improved product innovation capabilities. Third, we develop and test a three-way complementarities model that indicates that the combination of external focus, decentralization, and IT is associated with significantly higher productivity in our sample. We also introduce a new set of instrumental variables representing barriers to IT-related organizational change and find that our results are robust when we account for the potential endogeneity of organizational investments. Our results may help explain why firms that operate in information-rich environments such as high-technology clusters or areas with high worker mobility have experienced especially high returns to IT investment and suggest a set of practices that some managers may be able to use to increase their returns from IT investments. This paper was accepted by Sandra Slaughter, information systems.