Firms have increasingly standardized their enterprise systems (ES) to streamline operations, reduce costs, and improve coordination across business units. However, how ES standardization, defined as implementing the same enterprise system modules across business units, affects firm performance remains unexplored. To advance our understanding of the value implications of ES standardization, we draw upon organizational information processing theory (OIPT). Using a sample of 1728 firm-year observations from the United States, we find that ES standardization has a negative influence on firm performance. However, this effect can be attenuated when firms make greater IT investments, leading to superior performance in the presence of both greater ES standardization and increased IT investment—two key moderators in our model. Furthermore, our analyses reveal that environmental uncertainty—specifically, industry dynamism and complexity—amplifies the moderating role of IT investment in the relationship between ES standardization and firm performance. Our theoretical framework and empirical findings underscore the importance of considering ES standardization as a critical factor in assessing the business value of IT.

Information Systems research provides significant insight into how information technologies affect the strategic agility of firms. Most research to date has studied the responding element of agility at the expense of sensing. Further, extant research has mainly focused on how the sensing of formal and strong signals might influence agility. With the highly turbulent and fast-changing competitive landscape of the digital age, we argue for the need to expand the focus of this research to include examining how managers identify and make sense of weak signals, and how the sensing of weak signals influences digital-enabled strategic agility. Drawing on social network theory, this paper presents two streams of research and several research avenues that can stimulate and potentially guide research efforts on this topic.

Research on information technology (IT) outsourcing adoption has been confined to a single-country perspective. The understanding of how country-specific variables influence the adoption of IT outsourcing is limited. This study uses new institutional economics to build a framework that links country-level factors to the adoption of IT domestic outsourcing. The authors suggest that country-level factors, such as the maturity of the IT-related legal system, social trust, uncertainty avoidance, Internet penetration, and the maturity of the IT outsourcing market, affect the opportunism costs and coordination costs involved in domestic IT outsourcing and influence its adoption among firms. The results show that the maturity of the IT-related legal system, social trust, and the maturity of the IT outsourcing market are positively associated with IT outsourcing adoption. The authors conclude the paper with a discussion of the study’s implications for practice and future research.

This paper describes the final phase of a study that validates a group of generic attributes of graduates of Australian undergraduate degree programs with majors in Information Systems (IS). 105 academics from all Australian universities that offer IS undergraduate degree programs of study and 53 member of the Australian Computer Society (ACS) took part in this study. A three round Delphi questionnaire was used. The results of this study are compared with a previous study of generic attributes conducted by the authors in Queensland, Australia. Differences between academics and industry are identified. The top three attributes in each study are the same, although the order is reversed in the national study. Some of these include the higher ranking of interpersonal skills, teamwork, and knowledge of the IS discipline by academics compared with the higher ranking of industry of self-motivation and the ability to learn independently. Other major findings include the high ratings of the attributes of team participation and the commitment to further learning and intellectual development. Oral and written communications are significantly rated as more important than a comprehensive knowledge of IS. This study has a very strong overall correlation with the previous Queensland study.