Our knowledge of how users reinvent information technologies (IT) in ways that depart from their intended purposes to achieve new goals is relatively limited. Drawing on a human agency theory that situates actors in the flow of time, this paper develops a theory of IT reinvention. It identifies the key subprocesses of IT reinvention, describes two patterns of reinvention (performance-oriented and mastery-oriented), and explains how the present and the past influence the ambiguities, demands, and dilemmas inherent to each pattern. The outcomes associated with each pattern of IT reinvention are also discussed. The paper provides the theoretical foundations to understand how users reinvent IT as well as new insights into a broader range of post-adoption behaviors.
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.