Can Intra-Firm IT Skills Benefit Supply Chain Integration and Performance?

While inter-firm collaboration and integration remain critical for supply chain performance and information technology (IT) has been playing an increasingly important role in inter-firm cooperation, whether intra-firm IT skills can impact the inter-firm integration of IT has not been explored in the IS area. IT human capital involving soft skills and hard skills is a relatively unexplored topic, especially in the supply chain context. This study develops a model to examine whether intra-firm IT skills can have cross-boundary effects on supply chain collaboration and integration, which then can lead to greater supply chain performance. Accordingly, eight hypotheses were proposed and the model was tested with Partial Least Square technique based on the data collected from a survey of 250 manufacturing firms in Taiwan. The results largely support our model with seven hypotheses confirmed. By focusing on the supply chain context, this study thus extends and integrates the literatures on IT skills and supply chain management by showing the boundary-spanning effect of intra-firm capabilities on inter-firm collaboration, integration and performance. Implications of the results are provided and limitations and future research directions are discussed.