Special issue on leveraging the IS organization for business value creation

W e are pleased to introduce this special issue of the Journal of Information Technology on Leveraging the IS Organization for Business Value Creation. While organizations continue to seek ways to leverage information technology (IT) to create business value (Petter et al., 2012), an ever-increasing rate of IT innovation combined with new service delivery models presents unprecedented challenges (Yoo et al., 2010) and opportunities. The IS organization finds it very difficult to keep up with, let alone to lead, rapid development of mobile computing, social media, cloud computing , virtualization, business analytics, artificial intelligence, and the internet of things. The increased complexity of IT applications and infrastructure forces organizations to spend more resources in keeping the lights on and to allocate less resources in creating new business value (Xia and Lee, 2005). Outsourcing, offshoring, and Software as a Service are changing the traditional role and expectation of the IS organization in delivering business value (Gregory et al., 2013). In-house proprietary systems have been largely replaced by standardized, off-the-shelf, open systems. With the commoditization of IT, every organization has access to the same technology. Consequently, a sustainable source of competitive advantage does not lie in technology per se but in the business–IS collaboration that facilitates the realization of the potential value of technology. An organization creates business value not only through its internal business–IS dialog, but also co-creates greater value by collaborating with other organizations, customers, and even the public through a broader business–IS dialog (Grover and Kohli, 2012). Creating the business value through IT has been one of the major research topics in the IS field. Over the last decade, there has been an important debate on whether or not IT matters as a source of competitive advantage (Carr, 2003; DeJarnett et al., 2004). Furthermore, researchers and practitioners have been engaged in a related debate on whether the IS organization is a cost center or a value creator. While empirical evidence generally supports a positive effect of IT on organizational some of the fundamental questions about IT-value creation remain unaddressed or only partially addressed. For example, the definition of business value of IT is still ambiguous (Oz, 2005) and we have limited understanding about the process by which IT contributes to business value and the role of the IS organization in the process (Schryen, 2013). Furthermore, despite the long-standing interest in the digital government (Lee and Kwak, 2012), little is …