IT Business Value Research (ITBV)
‘Invisible business value of IT’ with lacking, or in many cases at least delayed bottom-line impact, led to the extensive ‘productivity paradox’ discussion in 80’s and 90’s (Brynjolfsson 1993; Solow 1987). Although there is today a strong evidence that IT adds value (Kohli and Grover 2008) together with organizational variables, the same productivity discussion has popped up once in a while (Carr 2003) - most recently, at the eve of digitalization as a ‘modern productivity paradox’ (Brynjolfsson et al. 2017).
ITBV has been recognized to manifest through conversion processes (see e.g., Gandelman et al. 2019) where commodity-like IT resource is converted to a synergistically operating and value enhancing asset embedded (Kohli and Grover 2008) to the organization and individual organizational capabilities within their context (see e.g., Schryen 2013) where alignment (Miller 1996) is pursued with coordinated complementary investments to adjust organizational variables (see review by Cao 2010). Regardless of an extensive and continuously sharpening body of research (see e.g., reviews by Schryen 2013; Schweikl and Obermaier 2022; Zhang and Arun 2021) and development of several configurational multivariate organizational models (see e.g., Cao 2010 and Schweikl and Obermaier 2022), the challenge, and a research gap, is in identification of relevant organizational variables (Gandelman et al. 2019), understanding of their interdependencies (Cao 2010), and estimation of the performance impact of different configurations (Nevo and Wade 2010). Additionally, feasibility of the prevailing reductionistic approach, especially in empirical investigations, has been questioned and the need for more holistic approach (Fink 2011), where ITBV is the behavior of the system (Ackoff 1999; Churchman 1971), has been emphasized. In this research, a holistic and business need-driven approach is embraced, but also a hierarchical view and dynamic nature of an organization is considered.