Conclusions and Implications
Of the five attributes of IT studied in this paper, application of the resource-based logic summarized in Figure 1 suggests that only IT managerial skills are likely to be a source of sustained competitive advantage. IT management skills are often heterogeneously distributed across firms. Moreover, these skills reflect the unique histories of individual firms, are often part of the "taken for granted" routines in an organization, and can be based on socially complex relations within the IT function, between the IT function and other business functions in a firm, and between the IT function and a firm's suppliers or customers.
On the other hand, customer IT-based switching costs are usually not even economically valuable, let alone a source of sustained competitive advantage. Customers will generally anticipate the risks associated with such switching costs and will insist on various guarantees before making these kinds of investments. Even if a customer makes these investments without such guarantees, the exploitation of switching costs can lead a firm to gain a reputation as an untrustworthy supplier. Indeed, given the evolution of IT, it is becoming progressively more difficult to "capture" customers through switching costs. Access to capital is also not likely to be a source of sustained competitive advantage, especially for ITs that are neither
large nor particularly risky. Even when these investments are large and risky, differential access to capital, per se, is not a source of sustained competitive advantage. Rather, differential access to capital reflects a firm's differential technical and managerial IT skills. Also, it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep information technology proprietary, and thus, proprietary IT is not likely to be a source of sustained competitive advantage. Finally, while technical IT skills are absolutely essential for a firm to gain even competitive parity in IT, they are, by themselves, not likely to be a source of sustained competitive advantage.
This analysis has important implications for both researchers and managers. For researchers, the resource-based view of the firm suggests that the search for IT-based sources of sustained competitive advantage must focus less on IT, per se, and more on the process of organizing and managing IT within a firm. It is the ability of IT managers to work with each other, with managers in other functional areas in a firm, and with managers in other firms that is most likely to separate those firms that are able to gain sustained competitive advantages from their IT and those that are only able to gain competitive parity from their IT. These skills, and the relationships upon which they are built, have been called managerial IT skills in this paper. Future research will need to explore, in much more detail, the exact nature of these managerial IT skills, how they develop and evolve in a firm, and how they can be used to leverage a firm's technical IT skills to create sustained competitive advantage.
Also, while this paper examined the ability of five widely cited potential IT-based sources of sustained competitive advantage, there may be other attributes of IT whose competitive implications have not been fully evaluated. This paper suggests a framework that can be used to evaluate these competitive implications. Additional conceptual work will be required to describe these other IT attributes and their relationship to the resource-based view of the firm. Moreover, empirical tests of the arguments presented here and other resource-based arguments about IT attributes will also need to be c
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