As the digitization of the global economy unfolds, information technology (IT) and information systems (IS) deploying IT are becoming ever more essential to the value delivery by organizations and by the webs of cooperating firms. The creation, appropriation, and measurement of the delivered value are far from simple. In fact, they are the principal subject of our academic discipline.
In the Special Section on Digital
Economy and Information Technology Value, Guest Editors Eric K. Clemons, Rajiv
M. Dewan, and Robert J. Kauffman have assembled and led into print after
extensive reviews several papers that make a significant contribution to our
understanding of the processes through which IT delivers value in the digital
economy. Notable here is the complexity of interrelationships among the firms
in value creation. Outsourcing, supply-chain effects, complementarities, and
licensing-based innovation sharing are all the subject of analysis, to which
the Guest Editors provide an extensive introduction.
Information overload is an
epiphenomenon of the digital economy. In the first paper of the general
section, Chih-Ping Wei, Roger H.L. Chiang, and Chia-Chen Wu present an approach
to the categorization of electronic documents based on the personal preferences
as expressed in the individual’s prior partial clustering. The empirical
evaluation of the four proposed techniques shows their superiority to the
traditional document-clustering methods. Further continuation of this research
stream will be important to cognitive coping with the avalanche of electronic
text, which may mirror more than traditional documents. Navigating social
networks comes to mind.
Two subsequent papers address
consumer behavior in e-commerce. The first investigates the consumers’
willingness to pay for online content. More specifically, at issue is
extracting monetary gains from the content that may be interesting and
enjoyable (and paid for when packaged into a paper-based magazine or
newspaper), yet of no specific utilitarian value. The extent of the willingness
to pay for such content has been, as we know, limited. Here, Alexandre B. Lopes
and Dennis F. Galletta establish empirically that the willingness to pay is
directly related to the benefit expected by the consumer from the access to
information. The take-away to the practitioner is the need to clearly signal
the value of the content to the potential consumers, with several practical
suggestions offered by the authors.
The trust deficit inherent in
e-commerce has led to a broad research stream on trust in our discipline. Kai
H. Lim, Choon Ling Sia, Matthew K.O. Lee, and Izak Benbasat study the
effectiveness of two online trust-building methods. These authors find that the
endorsements by satisfied customers—and, crucially, peers perceived as
similar—are effective in enhancing the trust by a first-time visitor to an
e-tailer’s site. As in the previous paper, the authors offer practical
suggestions to enable e-tailers to benefit from this insight.
It is important to the further
progress of our discipline that the general models of information systems
adoption, diffusion, and success be contextualized. Because contingencies are
the way of management, the specialization of the general models is vital to the
enactment of their insights. In the concluding paper of the issue, Randy V.
Bradley, Jeannie L. Pridmore, and Terry Anthony Byrd examine the nomological
network of the DeLone and McLean IS success model within the context of two
different corporate cultures, dichotomized as entrepreneurial and formal, while
including the impact of the IT plan in the empirical study. The results offer a
textured understanding of the role of IT at various levels of decision making
in the firms that largely explore or largely exploit.
Vladimir Zwass
Editor-in-Chief