IT assimilation and business performance improvement: Theory and empirical investigation in the context of E -procurement applications

This dissertation examines two important IT management issues: IT assimilation and Business Value of IT. First, this dissertation examines the factors that influence the assimilation of e-procurement within organizations. Second, this dissertation investigates the relationship between the assimilation and the performance improvement. Combined together, the answers to these questions are expected to provide valuable management implications for facilitating a successful assimilation and, in turn, achieving intended business performance improvement through the assimilation efforts by organizations.;Study 1 proposes and tests a conceptual model that facilitates a greater understanding of the types of organizational determinants that help organizations to effectively manage their e-procurement assimilation efforts. Over the past decades, IT adoption and diffusion have continued to be a subject of considerable interest to the academic community, and significant research on this topic has been conducted in many different contexts. While these previous research efforts significantly improved our understanding of IT innovation in general and e-business innovation in specific, several gaps may be identified in the literature and the previous studies may fall short in providing clear guidelines to understand the adoption and diffusion of e-business within organizations. Previous studies mainly focus on non-Internet technologies and a single event of the adoption decision in the diffusion process. While this is helpful for understanding factors that affect adoption decisions, the gaps in the previous literature limit our understanding of the e-business diffusion process. This study seeks to narrow these gaps, and key research questions that motivate this study include: (1) what factors can be identified as key determinants of e-business diffusion throughout the complete range of the diffusions process? (2) whether and how the effects of determinants vary across different stages of the diffusion process. To address the questions, this study develops a conceptual model for e-business assimilation drawing upon the diffusion of innovation framework and a resource-bases perspective. This study investigates the assimilation of e-business in the context of e-procurement, which is rapidly becoming one of the most promising and popular Internet applications. An integrative model for e-business assimilation is developed incorporating several determinants from the two theoretical perspectives to enhance our understanding of the factors leading to organizational assimilation of e-business. The model is further elaborated to examine the potential difference in the way that the determinants affect e-procurement assimilation across different assimilation phases. To validate the model, survey data of 671 organizations in service industries have been collected through a series of web-based surveys and tested using structural equation modeling. The results have identified significant determinants of the e-procurement assimilation in general. The results also show that the extent of the effects of selected determinants varies across the assimilation phases, namely investigation phase and implementation phase, suggesting that the determinants of e-procurement assimilation may play a different role depending on the phases of e-procurement assimilation.;Study 2 attempts to enhance our understanding of factors that affect IT impact on performance by examining the link between the determinants of IT implementation success and organizational performance, especially the link mediated through IT usage. The problem of measuring the contribution of IT investments has been one of the main, controversial issues among researchers and professionals in the field of information systems (IS). A large body of academic literature has investigated the relationship between IT investments and payoffs realized. While these studies significantly improve our understanding of the contribution of IT investment to organizational performance, they provide limited insights and business implications on the question of what factors besides the IT investments might affect the actual realization of business performance improvement. This study attempts to fill this gap and enhance our understanding of factors that affect IT impact on performance by examining the link between the determinants of IT implementation success and organizational performance and the mediating role of IT usage in the link especially in the context of e-procurement assimilation. In specific, the key research questions that motivate this study include: (1) Does e-procurement applications have positive impacts on purchasing performance? (2) What are the factors that contribute to the positive impacts? In an effort to address these research issues, this study first probes the link between the usage of e-procurement applications and intermediate purchasing performance measures, and examines the impact of the determinants of e-procurement implementation success on the purchasing performance improvement, mediated through e-procurement usage. The empirical investigation of this study is conducted using survey data of e-procurement assimilation by organizations in service industries that are collected through a series of web-based surveys. The results support the positive and significant link between the determinants of the implementation success and performance and demonstrate the mediating role of usage in the link.