IT alignment research has remained limited primarily to intra-organisational alignment, leaving much to learn about the value-creation potential of its largely neglected inter-organisational counterpart. This study addresses this gap by investigating the role of IT-business operational alignment in inter-organisational relationships (IOR). Drawing on IT-based value-co creation and IT alignment literature, we propose that IOR IT-business operational alignment is an immediate source for co-creating business value and can be established through a capability-building process. Using a sample of 241 regional network collaborations in Germany, we find that IOR IT-business operational alignment directly affects relationship performance. Moreover, we find that three IOR IT capabilities – IT infrastructure integration, information exchange capability, and IT-enabled coordination – enable the development of IOR IT-business operational alignment. This study contributes to IS research on value co-creation by integrating the concept of IT-business alignment into a nomological network with well-established IOR IT capabilities. We provide theoretical explanations and empirical evidence that IT infrastructure integration, information exchange capability, and IT-enabled coordination indirectly affect relationship performance over an operational alignment process. For practice, we highlight the importance of monitoring IT-business operational alignment in IOR and provide recommendations on how to expand existing alignment efforts.

Aiming to support digital innovation endeavours, industrial-age companies increasingly acquire firms that heavily build upon digital technologies. Related research has raised serious concerns regarding the prospects of such plans, yet has not focused the particular context of digital mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Drawing on a knowledge-based perspective as well as the particularities of digital technologies and the context of digital innovation, we theorise the link between digital M&A, a digital knowledge base on the part of the acquirer, and the consequences for digital innovation and firm performance. We employ panel data regressions to a longitudinal dataset of the world’s largest automobile manufacturers. Our findings suggest that executing digital M&A contributes to building the digital knowledge base of industrial-age firms, which in turn enables them to drive digital innovation. Our findings further indicate that digital innovation improves firm performance of industrial-age firms. We discuss implications for information systems research about M&A and digital innovation as well as recommendations for managerial practice.

For a company to be consistently oriented toward its customers and their processes, it needs to customize its intra-corporate processes and systems. Customer process-oriented portals that integrate companies’ systems and provide transparent access to information objects stored in these systems seem to offer a solution. However, one key problem is finding relevant information objects in systems that are not only growing, but also being disseminated. There is the additional challenge of making knowledge available at the right time and the right place. Companies’ competitive advantage is rooted in this knowledge advantage as well as in the capability to transform this superior knowledge into market-driven business processes. The research questions addressed in this article are how the value of information objects is affected by the context in which it is considered, and how associated contexts can be uncovered for given situations. We introduce a continuum of context explication comprised of the relationships between data, information objects, and knowledge, and their contexts, according to their degree and ease of context explication. The extremes of the continuum would therefore be data with no context to explicate and knowledge with rich, person-specific context. We conclude that discovering implicit meanings and expressing those meanings explicitly increases the potential value of information objects. In addition, we evaluate the full-text search, attribute-based search, and topic maps as approaches for knowledge discovery through customer process-oriented portals as well as providing patterns that indicate when to apply which approach. Two small case studies of knowledge discovery through such portals are presented. We conclude with suggestions for future research based on our final deductions in respect of the study.