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Revisiting IS business value research: what we already know, what we still need to know, and how we can get there

  • Literature Review
  • Published:
European Journal of Information Systems

Abstract

The business value of investments in Information Systems (IS) has been, and is predicted to remain, one of the major research topics for IS researchers. While the vast majority of research papers on IS business value find empirical evidence in favour of both the operational and strategic relevance of IS, the fundamental question of the causal relationship between IS investments and business value remains partly unexplained. Three research tasks are essential requisites on the path towards addressing this epistemological question: the synthesis of existing knowledge, the identification of a lack of knowledge and the proposition of paths for closing the knowledge gaps. This paper considers each of these tasks. Research findings include that correlations between IS investments and productivity vary widely among companies and that the mismeasurement of IS investment impact may be rooted in delayed effects. Key limitations of current research are based on the ambiguity and fuzziness of IS business value, the neglected disaggregation of IS investments, and the unexplained process of creating internal and competitive value. Addressing the limitations we suggest research paths, such as the identification of synergy opportunities of IS assets, and the explanation of relationships between IS innovation and change in IS capabilities.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Editor-in-Chief, the Associate Editor and the anonymous reviewers, who all provided many valuable comments that helped to improve the paper. I also thank Rachel Teear for her editorial assistance.

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  1. Institute of Management Information Systems, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany

    Guido Schryen

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Appendices

Appendix A

Statistics on IS business value papers published

Figure A1

Figure A1
figure 7

Number of IS business value papers published in renowned academic outlets.Note: We only considered papers where the primary focus lies on ‘IS business value’.

Full size image

Appendix B

Identifying relevant literature

In order to identify relevant literature, we followed the theoretical suggestions of Webster & Watson (2002, p. xvi) and the practical procedure applied by Melville et al (2004) in their literature review. Overall, the process of identifying relevant literature consisted of four phases, which took more than 1 year to complete.

  1. 1

    With the help of a student research assistant, we performed a title search in pertinent journal databases, namely Business Source Premier, MLA International Bibliography, EconLit, ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore, The ACM Digital Library and Web of Science. The logical search string was: (‘IT’ OR ‘information technology’ OR ‘IS’ OR ‘information systems’) AND (‘value’ OR ‘investment’ OR ‘productivity’ OR ‘competitive’ OR ‘performance’ OR ‘measurement’ OR ‘evaluation’ OR ‘profit’ OR ‘efficiency’). We did not limit our search to any specific time period. The last update of our search was conducted on 13 January 2012. In order to assure that no studies published in one of the most important IS journals were overlooked, we also scanned the table of contents in the following journals (the time period under consideration was January 1995 until December 2011):

    1. a)

      MIS Quarterly, Communications of the ACM, Information Systems Research, Management Science, and Journal of Management Information Systems: These journals were classified as the five leading journals in the latest MIS journal ranking (Rainer & Miller, 2005).

    2. b)

      European Journal of Information Systems, Information Systems Journal and Journal of AIS: These journals are included in the more recent AIS list entitled ‘Senior Scholars’ Basket of Journals’ (http://home.aisnet.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=346).

    3. c)

      Academy of Management Review, ACM Transactions on Information Systems, American Economic Review, Organization Science: Following references provided in the literature and by the reviewers and the editor of this paper, we found these journals appropriate candidates for containing valuable articles on IS business value. However, this selection mirrors the subjective opinion of the author.

  2. 2

    We scanned the references of literature reviews that were identified during phase 1. This procedure also allowed us to identify further literature reviews. The procedure was iterated until no further review was found. At the end of phase 2, we identified more than 400 research papers, including 20 literature reviews.

  3. 3

    With the help of a student research assistant, we scanned the abstracts of these research papers and excluded those papers that did not seem to be related to the investigation of IS business value or that did not meet academic standards. In some cases it was also necessary to investigate the body of the paper at this stage. At the end of phase 3, we identified 327 research papers related to the economic value of IS.

  4. 4

    In phase 4, we analysed the body of these papers regarding their research questions, methodology and research models, and characteristics. From this list, we removed those empirical papers, which either did not describe their research model or which used a considerably small sample. The remaining articles are included in this study.

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Schryen, G. Revisiting IS business value research: what we already know, what we still need to know, and how we can get there. Eur J Inf Syst 22, 139–169 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/ejis.2012.45

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