چگونه قابلیت مدیریت اطلاعات بر عملکرد شرکت تاثیر می گذارد How Information Management Capability Influences Firm Performance

Despite significant progress in answering the question of how information technology contributes to firm performance (see Dedrick et al. 2003; Wade and Hulland 2004), at least three opportunities remain. First, the recent business value of IT literature has highlighted the importance of information management aspects of IT capability (Bhatt and Grover 2005; Cotteleer and Bendoly 2006; Kohli 2007; Kohli and Grover 2008; Marchand 2005; Marchand et al. 2000; Marchand et al. 2002; Mendelson and Pillai 1998). However, with some notable exceptions (e.g., Marchand et al. 2000), few studies have empirically examined the link between information management capability and firm performance. Second, the role and articulation of “the underlying mechanisms” through which IT capabilities improve firm performance remain unclear (Bharadwaj 2000, p. 188). Finally, from an empirical perspective, many of the prior studies linking IT and related capabilities with firm performance do not fully address the issues related to reactive measures and unobserved firm heterogeneity. This paper draws on the business value of IT and quality management (QM) literature to link information management capability and firm performance and makes three contributions. First, we focus on information management capability—that is, the ability to provide data and information to users with the appropriate levels of accuracy, timeliness, reliability, security, confidentiality, connectivity, and access and the ability to tailor these in response to changing business needs and directions. We use a continuous measure of information management capability to respond to calls for research to develop “a continuous assessment of IT capability and reduce the problems occurring due to the binary nature of the existing measure” (Santhanam and Hartono 2003, p. 151). Second, we identify three significant organizational capabilities that mediate the links between information management capability and firm performance: (1) performance management capability, or the ability to develop appropriate monitoring, evaluation, and control systems to observe business performance and guide managerial actions (Bourne et al. 2002; Eccles 1991; Kaplan and Norton 1992); (2) customer management capability, or the ability to develop significant customer relationships and nurture customers both as consumers and as innovation partners in new product development (Mithas et al. 2005; Nambisan 2002); and (3) process management capability, or the ability to develop processes with appropriate reach and richness for guiding manufacturing, supply chain, software development, financial, and other important activities (Davenport and Beers 1995; Ramasubbu et al. 2008; Sambamurthy et al. 2003). Third, we use a rare longitudinal data set with relatively unobtrusive measures based on Baldrige criteria for performance excellence (see NIST 2002). This data set provides continuous and unobtrusive measures of organizational capabilities to obviate some of the inherent limitations of surveybased approaches, which can suffer from reactive measurement and the potential of research and questionnaire design affecting the research outcome (Webb et al. 1966). Because of the panel nature of our data, we rule out concerns related to endogeneity and unobserved time-invariant heterogeneity that are difficult to address in cross-sectional regression or path models.