Abstract

As a result of the emergence of the Internet and net-enabled business processes, many industries have experienced a period of IT-enabled transformation in which organizations and business operations changed very rapidly. A natural question that arises is how can firms survive and even thrive during such transformations? In addressing this question, we show how a firm’s strategic change orientation—a meta-construct consisting of technological opportunism, market orientation, and entrepreneurial orientation—can influence the assimilation of IT and the resulting performance of business processes. We identify and examine two separate change enablers through which this influence occurs: (1) the development of IT capabilities; (2) the creation of a positive climate for IT use. These two change enablers influence the assimilation of technology within the organization and the resulting business process performance. We test the proposed model using a survey of 153 organizations in the retail auto industry, a compelling example of an industry that has undergone an IT-enabled transformation. Results explain 34% of the variance in process performance, and 34% of the variance in financial performance.

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