With the growing recognition of the customer's role in service creation and delivery, there is an increased impetus on building customer-centric organizations. Digital technologies play a key role in such organizations. Prior research studying digital business strategies has largely focused on building production-side competencies and there has been little focus on customer-side digital business strategies to leverage these technologies. We propose a theory to understand the effectiveness of a customer-side digital business strategy focused on localized dynamics-here, a firm's customer service units (CSUs). Specifically, we use a capabilities perspective to propose digital design as an antecedent to two customer service capabilities-namely, customer orientation capability and customer response capability-across a firm's CSUs. These two capabilities will help a firm to locally sense and respond to customer needs, respectively. Information quality from the digital design of the CSU is proposed as the antecedent to the two capabilities. Proposed capabilitybuilding dynamics are tested using data collected from multiple respondents across 170 branches of a large bank. Findings suggest that the impacts of information quality in capability-building are contingent on the local process characteristics. We offer implications for a firm's customer-side digital business strategy and present new areas for future examination of such strategies.

a b s t r a c tIn contemporary business environments, the ability to manage operational knowledge is an important predictor of organizational competitiveness. Organizations invest large sums in various types of information technologies (ITs) to manage operational knowledge. Because of their superior storage, processing and communication capabilities, ITs offer technical platforms to build knowledge management (KM) capabilities. However, merely acquiring ITs are not sufficient, and organizations must structure information system (IS) designs to leverage ITs for building KM capabilities. We study how technical and strategic IS designs enhance operational absorptive capacity (OAC) -the KM capability of an operations management (OM) department. Specifically, we use a capabilities perspective of absorptive capacity to examine potential absorptive capacity (POAC) and realized absorptive capacity (ROAC) capabilities -the two OAC capabilities that create and utilize knowledge, respectively. Our theory proposes that integrated IS capability, -an aspect of technical IS design -is an antecedent of POAC and ROAC capabilities, and business-IT alignment -an aspect of strategic IS design -moderates the relationship between integrated IS capability and ROAC capability. Combining data gleaned from a multi-respondent survey with archival data from COMPUSTAT, we test our hypotheses using a dataset from 153 manufacturing organizations. By proposing that IS design enables an OM department's KM processes, i.e., the POAC and ROAC capabilities, our interdisciplinary theoretical framework opens the "black box" of OAC and contributes to improved understanding of IS and OM synergies. We offer a detailed discussion of our contributions to the literature at the IS-OM interface and implications for practitioners. "The computer is merely a tool in the process. . .To put it in editorial terms, knowing how a typewriter works does not make you a writer. Now that knowledge is taking the place of capital as the driving force in organizations worldwide, it is all too easy to confuse data with knowledge and information technology with information."

No abstract

No abstract