Towards Maturity Models as Methods to Manage IT for Business Value - A Resource-based View Foundation

For more than three decades business value of IT attracts attention in Information Systems Research (ISR) and practice. Despite the fact, that corporate management considers enterprise IT increasingly as a strategic factor, the question on how to manage IT effectively for business value remains widely unsolved. With the goal to support this management task we suggest maturity models (MMs) as a new method. We found MMs in the resource-based view in order to provide maturity models with a theoretical basis in general and to lay out the feasibility of MMs as methods to manage IT resources for business value in particular. To accomplish these goals, we conduct an in-depth analysis using an argumentative-deductive research approach. We contribute to the knowledge base by adopting a well-proven approach, transferring it to a new application domain, and grounding it in theory. Taking an example from corporate management research we illustrate our findings schematically.