Abstract

After over two decades of IT value research, there is growing evidence that organizations benefit from investments in IT. Hence, it is time to shift from justifying IT value to understanding the conditions under which it occurs. Although the relevance of contextual factors for the impact of IT investments has been highlighted in several studies, the literature is still too limited to draw a clear representation. This study contributes to the nascent stream that incorporates contextual factors with regard to the impact of IT investments on performance outcomes. By drawing on organizational information processing theory, we develop a research model and propose that the relationship between IT-enabled collaboration and supply chain performance is moderated by several dimensions of environmental uncertainty, namely product complexity, technological uncertainty, demand uncertainty, and supply uncertainty. Based on an analysis of data gathered from 150 supply chain executives, the study sheds light on the salient ques-tion of the conditions under which IT creates value in the context of supply chains. The findings advance the knowledge frontier of IT value research by providing evidence that performance outcomes are con-tingent on various environmental conditions and offering an explanation for the mixed results observed in previous literature.

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