Fakultät Informatik und Mathematik
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In the era of digitalization, companies review how to build competitive advantage drawing on their capabilities. In this context, the paper revisits the concept of IT capabilities. We summarize the “canonical” body of literature to characterize how leading scholars conceptualized and differentiated IT capabilities and then we show how new types of IT capabilities (for example, rising from SMACIT technologies) relate to this. We find that the resource-based view is still leading in how to conceptualize IT capabilities. However, an alternative perspective on IT assets is emerging, looking at it from the angle of digital technologies as stacks. Digital technologies form the foundation for a new technology-driven perspective on IT capabilities. This new view complements the established differentiation of IT capabilities considering IT infrastructure flexibility, IT management, and IT personnel capability. Both perspectives describe the explorative and exploitative nature of IT capabilities. This paper helps scholars and practitioners to clearly distinguish different perspectives of IT capabilities on how to build a competitive advantage from IT today.
Today, information technology (IT) is not anymore solely deployed and maintained by the IT organization, but also by business units. IT deployed or managed by business units is called Shadow IT (without alignment with the IT organization) or Business-managed IT (in alignment or a split responsibility model with the IT organization), contrasting “classical” IT. However, the responsibility for deployed IT might change over time. Therefore, this paper conceptualizes the progression of the responsibility for IT as a trajectory through initialization, potential transitions, and discontinuance. The paper illustrates this conceptual framework using four exemplary case vignettes of IT instances. Empirical findings of the case vignettes determine indications when employees initialize an IT instance as Shadow IT, Business-managed IT, or IT-managed systems and reasons why the responsibility for an IT instance changes over time. The results suggest that scholars and practitioners should add a temporal dimension to the governance of IT instances.