In the late 1990s, most organizations adopted enterprise systems (ES) to automate their core business processes. The very same organizations are presented with a new wave of opportunities to innovate with digital technologies—technologies that purport to have diametrically opposed characteristics to ES. This study explores how organizations integrate digital technologies with their incumbent ES for attaining innovation. The study followed a qualitative approach and gathered data from four organizations consisting of six such projects. By applying a unique theoretical foundation, this study derives interesting insights into the orchestration process of ES and digital technologies for attaining innovation.

Responding to recent calls, this essay offers a commentary on the framing and definition of organizational digital transformation. We focus on the unique ontology of digital transformation and delineate it from neighboring concepts. Our contention is that, despite its volume, current research remains unclear about how the digital transformation of organizations differs from their IT-enabled transformation. We advocate definitional precision to foster knowledge accumulation and to enable scholars to pursue important research questions that are unique to digital transformation. Our perspective, grounded in the notion of digital resources, defines digital transformation as the metamorphosis of an IT-enabled organization into a digital organization – one with a specific digital architecture and design principles. A key departure from previous conceptualization is that we characterize digital transformation as a change in digital technology architecture rather than a change from digital technology use. Our paper achieves the following: describes the constructs underpinning this formulation, digital resources and digital organization; justifies their use; and describes what research directions the new perspective promotes. With sound definitions of key constructs, Information Systems scholars have the unprecedented opportunity to lead the way in digital “x” research, making our discipline the reference point for the burgeoning “digital research” literature in related business fields.

In a rapidly changing digital environment, companies must sense weak signals and respond to them. This essay focuses on how agile companies can be more responsive in a pervasively digital context. To build our argument, we discuss the ontological difference of digital (vs. IT) and then describe four tenets that characterise agile organisations: modular design and packaged capabilities, use of platforms over pipelines, ability to foster concurrency and agency through data, and a digital culture that promotes ambidexterity

Mobile technologies have dramatically increased the number of work-related interruptions, especially after regular work hours. At the same time, many employees have limited freedom to decide how and when they accomplish their work, a condition that renders the explosion of interruptions especially problematic. This study proposes that perceived interruption overload negatively impacts work-related technology-usage via workers’ experiences of work-life conflict, a key source of stress, and that this indirect effect is stronger for lower levels of worker control (moderated mediation). Data were collected from 601 knowledge workers and analyzed through Conditional process analysis, which integrates moderation and mediation analyses. The results supported our model. This study takes an important step toward elucidating the role of mobile technology in work-life conflict and technostress, and it illustrates the roles of perceived interruption overload as well as conflict and technostress in IT use.

The advent and proliferation of digital technologies purport to increase the innovation potential of most organizations. However, approximately 90% of new ideas never convert to new product or service deliveries because of the lack of organizational readiness. This paper conceptualizes a formative multidimensional construct to gauge organizational readiness for digital innovations. Such a construct would facilitate cumulative research on the role of digital innovation, while benchmarking to track organizational readiness. The proposed construct includes 21 measures, categorized under seven subconstructs: resource readiness, IT readiness, cognitive readiness, partnership readiness, innovation valance, cultural readiness, and strategic readiness.

Top management has been concerned with IT-business strategic alignment (hereafter referred to as alignment) for the past 30 years. Consequently, alignment researchers have developed many models to explain how alignment generates value for firms. However, these models use inconsistent definitions and measures of alignment, which has led to conflicting results and has potentially inhibited the progress of research on this critical topic. This paper emphasizes the importance of demarcating the six alignment types that are sometimes confused in the literature into a single, unified model. It also reports on the development of definitions and measures of these six types of alignment including alignment between IT and business strategies (i.e., intellectual alignment), between IT and business infrastructures and processes (i.e., operational alignment), and across these two domains such that strategies are linked with infrastructures and processes (i.e., four types of cross-domain alignment). Analyzing survey data collected from 140 Chief Information Officers, we found each measure possesses desirable psychometric properties. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is a phenomenon that is rapidly increasing in both incidence and importance. This study empirically examines the value proposition of BPO with respect to the nature of the processes being outsourced. Using the event study methodology, we employ the value chain (VC) position and existing ownership of a business process as our primary independent variables, and the stock abnormal return in response to the BPO announcement as the dependent performance variable in our research model. The study was conducted on 298 BPO announcements from 1998 to 2005. Results support the argument that outsourcing is valuable for both primary and supportive business processes. However, we found that BPO announcements on primary processes yield higher abnormal returns than supportive processes. Although existing process ownership was not found to be a powerful differentiator for BPO performance, its interaction with VC position provides important insights into the timing of outsourcing. The evidence suggests that internal cultivation of processes is important for BPO success, particularly when BPO is applied to primary processes.

E-business success is tied to the ability to foster customer loyalty. Businesses that deliver superior value derived from excellent services and quality products are likely to win customer loyalty. This paper examines Web-based services and the effects of three sets of factors: pre-purchase, transaction-related, and post-purchase services on customer loyalty (measured as repeat purchase intention from a given Web-based store) in a business-to-consumer environment. Based on the study's results, pre-purchase services that support search and evaluation of products replete in e-commerce systems have limited effect on customer loyalty. Among transaction-related services, transparency of the billing mechanism positively impacts customer loyalty. Customers shun any hidden costs associated with product acquisition. Post-purchase services consisting of support of order tracking, on-time delivery, and customer support positively influence customer loyalty. These findings imply that Web-based stores need to pay more attention to post-purchase services in their strategy to retain customers. This is what will keep customers satisfied and willing to continue the relationship with a company over the long term.