The business value of IT: New perspectives on IT value creation

The question of information technology business value (ITBV) first ap-peared along with the diffusion of information technology into organ-izations. Since then, extensive research efforts have been made to measure and quantify ITBV and to identify factors that influence the effectiveness of IT. However, due to the complexity of this subject and its sociotechnical nature, this research area is far from complete.
This thesis divides the extant literature on ITBV into three re-search areas and argues for these as the three main components of ITBV. The first component is IT value creation, which serves as the the-oretical foundation of ITBV. The second component refers to the so-called contextual factors of IT. These factors influence the effective-ness of IT and thus determine the magnitude of the realized ITBV. The third component is associated with measures of ITBV since appropri-ateness and accuracy affect ITBV through management actions. In par-ticular, subjective measures based on perception are further investi-gated in this vein of the thesis.
Dividing ITBV into three main components not only offers a com-prehensive overview of a broad topic but also illustrates the contribu-tion of each component to theory and practice. First, this thesis adds a new aspect to IT value creation, which, combined with the tech-niques for modeling the IT context suggested in this thesis, enhances the understanding and assessment of ITBV. Furthermore, a conceptu-alization of the lifecycle of the IT effect is presented, which demon-strates the dependency between contextual factors and both the ap-pearance and magnitude of the IT effect. Lastly, the consequences of misperceptions of ITBV are discussed, and the reasons for mispercep-tion are detailed.