Complementary Organizational Mechanisms: A Case Study on Information Technology Business Value

The complex relationships between organizational practices have been the focus of information technology business value (ITBV) research in recent years. There appears to be a discernible trend toward a more nuanced view in which the effects of information technology (IT), various organizational practices and their relationships are systematically investigated. There is also emerging evidence of recent focus in organizational factors and an increasing shift towards “complementarities” in which organizational performance is linked to combining organizational practices in synergistic ways. The objective of this paper is to investigate important issues in ITBV research by examining complementarities of various resources within an organization. The goal of this paper is to establish a framework for analyzing different configurations of complementarities. The Configuration and Interestingness framework (CIF) proposed in this paper provides evidence on how important the understanding of those complex relationship structures amongst organizational practices is to maximizing business value. This framework serves as a preliminary attempt to reveal different possible classes of complementarities structures.