Fast-paced environmental changes require that managers quickly sense opportunities for organizational innovation. Information systems (IS) that support business intelligence and analytics help managers access and analyze data from various sources, thereby providing insight into potential opportunities. Building on the dynamic managerial capability perspective, we investigate the extent to which two managerial IS use behaviorsÑroutine use and innovative useÑinfluence a manager's volume and diversity of ideas for organizational innovation. We also examine the moderating role of three organization-level entrepreneurial orientation characteristicsÑautonomy, innovativeness, and risk taking. We test our research model with survey data collected from 248 managers. Our results show that routine IS use is not related to volume or diversity of ideas for organizational innovation. However, innovative IS use is positively related to idea volume and idea diversity. Furthermore, organizational autonomy and innovativeness positively moderate the aforementioned innovative use/idea relationships. Our study contributes to the literature by linking postadoptive IS use behaviors to managerial sensing ability, an important dynamic managerial capability. We also further the understanding of how organizational factors such as entrepreneurial orientation play a key role in determining whether, when, and how managers use IS to develop ideas for organizational innovation. > >
This paper investigates how information technology (IT) facilitates a firm's customer agility and, in turn, competitive activity. Customer agility captures the extent to which a firm is able to sense and respond quickly to customer-based opportunities for innovation and competitive action. Drawing from the dynamic capability and IT business value research streams, we propose that IT plays an important role in facilitating a "knowledge creating" synergy derived from the interaction between a firm's Web-based customer infrastructure and its analytical ability. This will enhance the firm's ability to sense customer-based opportunities. IT also plays an important role in "process enhancing" synergy obtained from the interaction between a firm's coordination efforts and its level of information systems integration, which facilitates the firm's ability to respond to those opportunities. We also leverage the competitive dynamics and strategic alignment literature to propose that the alignment between customer-sensing capability and customer-responding capability will impact the firm's competitive activity. We test our model with a two-stage research design in which we survey marketing executives of high-tech firms. Our results show that a Web-based customer infrastructure facilitates a firm's customer-sensing capability; furthermore, analytical ability positively moderates this relationship. We also find that internal systems integration positively moderates the relationship between interfunctional coordination and a firm's customer-responding capability. Finally, our results show that agility alignment affects the efficacy of a firm's competitive actions. In particular, action efficacy is higher when sensing and responding capabilities are both high.
Absorptive capacity is a firm's ability to identify, assimilate, transform, and apply valuable external knowledge.It is considered an imperative for business success. Modern information technologies perform a critical role in the development and maintenance of a firm's absorptive capacity. We provide an assessment of absorptive capacity in the information systems literature. IS scholars have used the absorptive capacity construct in diverse and often contradictory ways. Confusion surrounds how absorptive capacity should be conceptualized, its appropriate level of analysis, and how it can be measured. Our aim in reviewing this construct is to reduce such confusion by improving our understanding of absorptive capacity and guiding its effective use in IS research. We trace the evolution of the absorptive capacity construct in the broader organizational literature and pay special attention to its conceptualization, assumptions, and relationship to organizational learning.Following this, we investigate how absorptive capacity has been conceptualized, measured, and used in IS research. We also examine how absorptive capacity fits into distinct IS themes and facilitates understanding of various IS phenomena. Based on our analysis, we provide a framework through which IS researchers can more fully leverage the rich aspects of absorptive capacity when investigating the role of information technology in organizations.