Impact of the Information Technology Unit on Information Technology-Embedded Product Innovation

Organizations increasingly embed IT into physical products to develop new product innovations. However, there is wide variance in the outcomes of the IT-embedded product (ITEP) innovation process. In this paper, we posit that the IT unit’s involvement in the ITEP innovation process could positively influence the outcomes. ITEP innovations become part of complex ecosystems in which they interact with their developers, customers, and other ITEPs. These developments suggest new roles for IT units of organizations. Yet, there is dearth of theory explaining how the IT unit of a firm could contribute to the firm’s development of ITEP innovations in ways to create customer value and improve firm performance. This paper seeks to address this gap. ITEP innovations present new challenges for organizations. This paper builds on complexity science to articulate the challenges and explain how the IT unit can increase an organization’s capacity to cope with them. First, the paper adopts Wheeler’s (2002) “net-enabled business innovation model” to structure the key stages of innovation that an organization goes through in developing new ITEPs. Second, the paper articulates IT-specific uncertainties and challenges entailed in each of the four stages. Third, the paper develops hypotheses explaining how the IT unit could increase the effectiveness of each stage by helping to address these uncertainties and challenges. Finally, the paper empirically tests and finds support for the hypotheses in a sample of 165 firms. The paper contributes to the literature on IT-enabled business innovations by developing and validating a new theoretical explanation of how IT units increase the effectiveness of the ITEP innovation process

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse