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The competitive impact of information technology: can commodity IT contribute to competitive performance?

  • Empirical Research
  • Published:
European Journal of Information Systems

Abstract

Despite polarizing arguments on the strategic potential of information technology (IT), academic research has yet to demonstrate clearly that information systems initiatives can lead to sustained competitive performance (CP). We investigate this question using data from 165 hotels affiliated with two brands of an international lodging chain. We study the effect of successful use and unreliability of an incremental IT-enabled self-service channel on overall CP. We find that the effect of the incremental service channel depends on the firm’s organizational resources. We also show that different organizations experience significantly different use and unreliability rates. Further, we find that the positive association between the use of an IT-enabled self-service channel and CP endures over a 2-year period, despite competitors’ widespread adoption of the technology enabling the incremental service channel (self-service kiosks). Our findings corroborate research on the strategic role of IT resources when appropriately coupled with complementary resources. They lead us to question the notion that IT is a strategic commodity. Indeed, the findings suggest that IT-dependent strategic initiatives have the potential to generate sustained CP, even when the technology that enables them appears ‘simple’. These findings suggest the need for a theoretical explanation of the complementarities and interaction among the elements of IT-dependent strategic initiatives.

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Notes

  1. GFLOPS stands for Giga Floating Point Operations per Second and is a rough standard measure of computational performance.

  2. Other control variables include the industry RevPAR monthly average by state, property size, and location factors (airport, city center, highway, industrial, resort, suburban, and rural).

  3. In other words, an increase of 1% in successful usage of the incremental channel in Brand B results in an increase of 1.93 RevPAR Index points.

  4. The American Hotel and Lodging Association (AH&LA) bi-annual lodging survey reported that 65% of respondents in the upscale segment had check-in kiosks operational, including all major chains. The survey polled 10,350 hotels between February and April 2008 (AH&LA, 2008).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy

    Gabriele Piccoli

  2. School of Hotel and Tourism Management, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Tsz-Wai Lui

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  1. Gabriele Piccoli
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Piccoli, G., Lui, TW. The competitive impact of information technology: can commodity IT contribute to competitive performance?. Eur J Inf Syst 23, 616–628 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/ejis.2013.20

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