Co-creating business value through IT-business operational alignment in inter-organisational relationships: empirical evidence from regional networks

ABSTRACT

IT alignment research has remained limited primarily to intra-organisational alignment, leaving much to learn about the value-creation potential of its largely neglected inter-organisational counterpart. This study addresses this gap by investigating the role of IT-business operational alignment in inter-organisational relationships (IOR). Drawing on IT-based value-co creation and IT alignment literature, we propose that IOR IT-business operational alignment is an immediate source for co-creating business value and can be established through a capability-building process. Using a sample of 241 regional network collaborations in Germany, we find that IOR IT-business operational alignment directly affects relationship performance. Moreover, we find that three IOR IT capabilities – IT infrastructure integration, information exchange capability, and IT-enabled coordination – enable the development of IOR IT-business operational alignment. This study contributes to IS research on value co-creation by integrating the concept of IT-business alignment into a nomological network with well-established IOR IT capabilities. We provide theoretical explanations and empirical evidence that IT infrastructure integration, information exchange capability, and IT-enabled coordination indirectly affect relationship performance over an operational alignment process. For practice, we highlight the importance of monitoring IT-business operational alignment in IOR and provide recommendations on how to expand existing alignment efforts.

ACCEPTING EDITOR:

• Ojelanki Ngwenyama

ASSOCIATE EDITOR:

• Jose Benitez

KEYWORDS:

• IT capabilities
• inter-organisational relationships
• IT-business operational alignment
• business value co-creation
• networks
• the business value of IT

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The terms “lower-order” and “higher-order” can also be used to define hierarchical component models (Ringle et al., 2012). Throughout the paper, we use the terms “lower-order” and “higher-order” strictly in the context of the capability-building-process adopted from the RBV (Grant, 1996; Teece et al., 1997) which is consistent with other research on IS resources (Benitez-Amado & Walczuch, 2012).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG), under grant [GRK1703/1].