A Contingent View Of The Formation Of Cross-organizational E-Business Capability

Internet and IT technology have greatly facilitated cross-organizational e-business applications for enterprises to respond quickly to market changes and meet customer demand has brought important opportunities. Cross-organizational e-business applications can reduce or even eliminate inefficient the transmission of information and redundant cooperative processes between the companies and partners, to achieve inter-enterprise information sharing and process integration, and forms new cross-organizational e-business capability finally. The capacity has become the key to successful cross-organizational cooperation and winning competition in the supply chain, but also about the performance of overall national competitiveness. However, the formation of cross-organizational e-business capability involves not only the application of IT resources, technical factors, but also affected inevitably by inter-organizational trust, commitment, relationship management and other factors, is a complex processes with fusion of technology and management. The formulation of cross-organizational e-business capability needs to consider in particular the co-ordination between technical factors and management factors, and relational governance is an important way to achieve such coordination. The difference levels of relational governance will bring about different levels of inter-organizational integration of IT resources to, showing a significant contingent effect. But many companies often attach importance to investment in IT technology, while ignoring the management control in the implementation of new technologies. So we need to focus attention on the contingent perspective to take the technical factors and relationship management both into account to build cross-organizational e-business capability.The existing researches on IT Capacity focus on the enabled role of Internet and IT for inter-organizational collaboration and supply chain integration. These studies mainly come from the field of information systems and operations management. Researches in the field of information systems generally believed that the application of IT resources can bring about inter-organizational collaboration and supply chain integration and, ultimately, high performance, but this view easily leads enterprises into a trap of "technological determinism". Researches in the field of operation management have focused on problem-solving of business operations aspects, ignored the complexity of IT technology itself and integration process of technology related resources. Only a few case studies noted the contingent relationship between relational governance and IT applications. Therefore, considering the both role of relational governance and IT resources for building across the organization e-business capacity has become the focus of academic problems to be solved.From the contingency perspective, this study established a model, which focuses on the role of inter-organizational IT-related resources to across-organizational e-business capability in context of different levels of relational governance. Based on the investigation of domestic manufacturing with the implementation of e-business in China and 216 data collected by interviews and questionnaires, this study demonstrated the contingency impacts of relational governance on the across organizational IT resources application forming e-business capability in the inter-enterprise electronic business applications. The main conclusions of this paper are as follows:1, Relational governance and inter-organizational IT resources directly affect the formation of cross-organizational e-commerce capability. Inter-organizational IT resources include not only the technical factors, which is IS integration and partnership between organizations, but also includes the knowledge of IT management skills factor. Enterprises must recognize that the implementation of e-business between the enterprises do not have the pre-decision role in the cooperation between the enterprise. Impact of the profound changes brought by implementation of e-commerce application; require considering the various IT-related business resources, including technical resources and knowledge resources.2, Relational governance has an important contingent differentiation influence on the effect of inter-organizational IT resources application. There are two aspects of the differentiation influence:First, upstream relational governance does not have contingent effect, while the downstream relational governance has contingent effect. Second, the downstream relational governance have positive adjustment effect on IS integration and partnership, and have the negative adjustment effect on IT management skills. The coexistence of positive and negative regulation mechanism of the downstream relational governance means that technical resources and knowledge resources are complementary with each other, and ultimately influence the formation of cross-organizational e-commerce capability.The two point of innovation in this study are as following:1. This study use the contingent perspective to investigate in the context of different levels of relational governance, the relationship between inter-organizational IT resources and e-commerce capability, and expand the traditional perspective of single organization to study the IT capacity with "resources-capacity" research framework. The contingent perspective has obvious innovative features, provide a new way to investigate the IT ability.2. The empirical results reveal the complex integrated features of the trade-off between technical resources and knowledge resources in the cross-organizational e-business application under the relational governance in the downstream, and provide a scientific basis for building cross-organizational e-business capacity by multi-organizations, also have important theoretical significance for e-business capability.This is a first empirical study with a large sample to investigate the relationship between relational governance and the effect of IT resources application, revealed that when applying cross-organizational e-business, companies need to trade-off technical resources between knowledge resources in the context of downstream relational governance. This study is a new exploration about the formation of e-business capability and will help enterprises better understand the complex formation of cross-organizational e-business capacity. By combing the technology and management perspective, this study provide an empirical basis for the deployment and rational planning of IT-related resources and relational governance, and has important practical significance.