Arun Rai

• Doctor of Philosophy, Management Information Systems
• Chair at Georgia State University

Our research reveals the significant impact of evolving policy uncertainty on hospital strategies to mitigate cost-based performance deficits in clinical care processes through differentiation in search for health information technology (HIT). Key for hospital administrators and managers, our findings reveal the benefit of leveraging external bench...

Situated in the U.S. electric utility industry in a period of significant market restructuring, our study investigates how market valuations of a firm’s investments to develop intrafirm and interfirm information technology (IT) capabilities are conditional on regulatory context. We find that firms are rewarded by investing in intrafirm IT capabilit...

Because health care delivery organizations (HDOs) increasingly rely on information technology (IT) in their delivery of health care services, recognition of how to exploit innovative electronic health (eHealth) technologies is crucial. We integrated absorptive capacity and governance perspectives to theorize that an HDO’s eHealth absorptive capacit...

We investigate how public firms configure their enterprise systems (ES) portfolio when faced with information risk, which refers to the likelihood that corporate financial information is of poor quality. We focus on firms’ configuration of their ES portfolio by introducing a novel construct: ES portfolio balance, or the relative proportion of two c...

Intelligent systems—incorporating computational tools, learning algorithms, and statistical models—can generate knowledge to empower employees in how they conduct their work and increase their job performance. How can organizations realize this potential? Our in-depth study of transformation of work with intelligent systems in a technology maintena...

To attain customer satisfaction, service firms invest significant resources to implement customer relationship management (CRM) systems to support internal customer service (CS) employees who provide service to external customers in both face-to-face and virtual channels. How CS employees apply sophisticated CRM systems to interact with customers a...

Although research has suggested that enterprise system (ES) implementations have major impacts on employee job characteristics and outcomes, there has been limited research that has examined the impacts of ES implementations on interpersonal relationships over time. Building on and extending recent studies that have examined changes in employee job...

While prior research has established that information technology (IT) investment has a significant impact on firm performance, relatively few studies have provided insights into the antecedents of IT investment decisions. By integrating the behavioral theory of the firm and agency theory, we propose a behavioral agency theory to explain performance...

This study investigates how long‐term partners can establish successful supply chain collaboration to accrue relationship benefits. Informed by the relational view, we identify governance and resource sharing as key mechanisms to create relationship benefits in supply chain relationships. We draw on the ambidexterity perspective to suggest that lon...

In the United States, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has begun instituting pay-for-performance incentives that reward hospitals based on patient-centric outcomes such as patient satisfaction. Further, to promote the “meaningful use” of health information technology (HIT), CMS has been prompting hospitals to adopt and use HITs. C...

Objective: This study compares use of Computerized Provider Order Entry (CPOE) and related clinical systems (i.e., extended CPOE) across 796 clinical teams caring for five distinct patient conditions. Our focus is the relationship between clinical teams' extended CPOE use and extent of prolonged stay (EPS), defined as the deviation in patients' ob...

Conceptualization in theory development has received limited consideration despite its frequently stressed importance in Information Systems research. This paper focuses on the role of construct clarity in conceptualization, arguing that construct clarity should be considered an essential criterion for evaluating conceptualization and that a focus...

Recent work has shown that a firm's plural sourcing strategy, which determines how much it chooses to make versus how much it chooses to buy, requires consideration of the complementarities and constraints that affect the differential advantages of making and buying. Elaborating on this perspective, we theorize how (mis)fit between a firm's plural...

While there is a rich body of literature on information system (IS) innovations, there is a limited understanding of the role IS leaders’ individual factors and their appraisals of technological factors play in organizations’ adoption of IS innovations. We address these gaps in the IS literature by focusing on an IS process innovation – namely, com...

A central challenge organizations face is how to build, store, and maintain knowledge over time. Enterprise wikis are community-based knowledge systems situated in an organizational context. These systems have the potential to play an important role in managing knowledge within organizations, but the motivating factors that drive individuals to con...

Two process capabilities have been identified in the operations management literature to leverage supplier relationships for competitive performance: the ability to continuously improve processes with suppliers (process alignment) and the ability to make changes to these relationships (partnering flexibility). While firms may need both capabilities...

Aguirre-Urreta and Marakas [Aguirre-Urreta M, Marakas G (2013) Research note—Partial least squares and models with formatively specified endogenous constructs: A cautionary note. Inform. Systems Res., ePub ahead of print September 5, http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/isre.2013.0493] aim to evaluate the performance of partial least squares (PLS) path modeli...

There is growing recognition that firms’ information technology (IT)-enabled business models (i.e., how interfirm transactions with suppliers, customers, and partners are structured and executed) are a distinctive source of value creation and appropriation. However, the concept of business models’ (BMs) “IT enablement” remains coarse in the informa...

Contextual ambidexterity of an interorganizational relationship (IOR) is the ability of its management system to align partners' activities and resources for short-term goals and adapt partners' cognitions and actions for long-term viability. It is an alternative to structural ambidexterity in which separate units of the IOR pursue short-and long-t...

Composite-based methods like partial least squares (PLS) path modeling have an advantage over factor-based methods (like CB-SEM) because they yield determinate predictions, while factor-based methods’ prediction is constrained in this regard by factor indeterminacy. To maximize practical relevance, research findings should extend beyond the study’s...

Improving the management of information technology (IT) projects is of prime concern to both IS researchers and practitioners, as IT projects are notorious for poor process performance, frequently running over budget and behind schedule. Over the years, at least two separate streams of research have emerged with the aim of contributing to our under...

A large proportion of information systems research is concerned with developing and testing models pertaining to complex cognition, behaviors, and outcomes of individuals, teams, organizations, and other social systems that are involved in the development, implementation, and utilization of information technology. Given the complexity of these soci...

We examine sourcing professionals’ work context to conceptualize how they use sourcing enterprise systems (SESs) and to understand when SES use results in positive/negative job outcomes. We differentiate between SES use for supplier selection and supplier governance, identify sourcing professionals’ work process interdependence as a moderator for t...

We identify two post-acceptance information system (IS) usage behaviors related to how employees leverage implemented systems. Routine use (RTN) refers to employees' using IS in a routine and standardized manner to support their work, and innovative use (INV) describes employees' discovering new ways to use IS to support their work. We use motivati...

Consumer use of mobile devices as health service delivery aids (mHealth) is growing, especially as smartphones become ubiquitous. However, questions remain as to how consumer traits, health perceptions, situational characteristics, and demographics may affect consumer mHealth usage intentions, assimilation, and channel preferences. We examine how c...

Today, call center employees’ service encounters with external customers are extensively supported with modern information technology (IT). However, prior research on service quality and zone of tolerance (ZOT) focuses primarily on external customers with little attention paid to how internal customers (e.g., service employees) respond to services...

PLS is used quite widely in the MIS field, but some evidence questioning its efficacy is mounting, at least in the eyes of the "nays". In this panel we bring together advocates of multiple perspectives of the debate, to lay the evidence on the table and to vigorously explore the various points of view. © (2013) by the AIS/ICIS Administrative Office...

Composite-based methods like partial least squares (PLS) path modeling have an advantage over factor-based methods (like CB-SEM) because they yield determinate predictions, while factor-based methods' prediction is constrained in this regard by factor indeterminacy. To maximize practical relevance, research findings should extend beyond the study's...

An increasing number of organizations are now implementing customer relationship management (CRM) systems to support front-line employees' service tasks. With the belief that CRM can enhance employees' service quality, management often mandates employees to use the implemented CRM. However, challenges emerge if/when employees are dissatisfied with...

We examined 335 business process outsourcing (BPO) ventures to understand the effect of contractual and relational governance factors on BPO satisfaction from the client's perspective. While both contractual and relational factors explain significant variance in BPO satisfaction, relational factors dominate. By examining interactions between key co...

This study seeks to identify the means by which information technology helps co-create relational value in the context of inter-firm relationships in the logistics industry — a large and information-intensive industry. We identify a set of IT functionalities — single-location shipping, multi-location shipping, supply chain visibility, and financial...

Aguirre-Urreta and Marakas (A&M) suggest in their simulation "Revisiting Bias Due to Construct Misspecification: Different Results from Considering Coefficients in Standardized Form," that, like Jarvis et al. (2003), MacKenzie et al. (2005), and Petter et al. (2007) before them, bias does occur when formative constructs are misspecified as reflecti...

We draw on the interorganizational relationship management literature to examine how contextual characteristics of the supplier portfolio (portfolio concentration, relationship length, and supplier substitutability) moderate the impacts of process alignment and partnering flexibility – two of a firm's key supplier-facing process capabilities to man...

How can firms extract value from already-implemented information technologies (IT) that support the work processes of employees? One approach is to stimulate employees to engage in post-adoptive extended use, i.e., to learn and apply more of the available functions of the implemented technologies to support their work. Such learning behavior of ext...

Digital inequality, or unequal access to and use of information and communication technologies (ICT), is a severe problem preventing the socioeconomically disadvantaged (SED) from participating in a digital society. To understand the critical resources that contribute to digital inequality and inform public policy for stimulating initial and contin...

We adopt a structural embeddedness perspective to explore how network structure shapes the type of value-creation opportunities that digital intermediaries can exploit and to understand the capabilities that they require to be successful in the context of different network structures. Through two comparative case studies, we find that different tie...

Vendors of IT-enabled services must address equivocal and changing requirements from diverse customers while simultaneously making a profit. However, our knowledge of how these organizations can achieve the necessary scalability is limited. Against this backdrop, we leverage organizational sensemaking to investigate how a large vendor attempted to...

This work seeks to complement and extend prior work by using a multidisciplinary approach to explain electronic medical records (EMR) system use and consequent performance (here, patient satisfaction) among physicians during early stages of the implementation of an EMR. This was a quantitative study, with data obtained from three distinct sources:...

Strategic change in, and adaptation of, organizations requires firms to invest in their resource base. Drawing on the resource based theory and the organizational architecture literatures; we examine how firm-specificity, complexity and modularity of a firm’s resources, individually and together, impact a firm’s performance relative to others in th...

We review and reframe three main quests of research on information systems (IS) strategy: (1) the strategic alignment quest, (2) the integration quest, and (3) the sustained competitive advantage quest. The assumptions and logic of these quests have become less relevant in increasingly complex adaptive business systems (CABS), where the competitive...

Firms are increasingly dependent on external resources and are establishing portfolios of interorganizational relationships (IRs) to leverage external resources for competitive advantage. However, the systems of information technology (IT) and process capabilities that firms should develop to manage IR portfolios dynamically are not well-understood...

Best practice suggests that a modular enterprise architecture, where interfaces between and among business processes and services are standardized, is a key IT capability for firms to achieve profitable growth. But few firms have successfully designed, implemented, and maintained such an architecture. This article presents findings on the drivers,...

Strategic change in, and adaptation of, organizations requires firms to invest in their resource base. Drawing on the resource based theory and the organizational architecture literature; we examine how firm-specificity, complexity and modularity of a firm’s resources, individually and together, impact a firm’s performance relative to others in the...

In recent years, hospitals have begun to invest in RFID systems to control costs, reduce errors, and improve quality of care. Despite the transformative impact that RFID may have in healthcare settings, few studies have examined how and why this change may occur. The purpose of this study is to systematically understand how RFID can transform work...

This paper focuses on strategic information flows between buyers and suppliers within logistics supply chain relationships and on subsequent relationship-specific performance outcomes. Our analysis of dyadic data collected from 91 buyer-supplier logistics relationships finds that buyer and supplier strategic information flows positively impact the...

Agency theory has served as a key basis for identifying drivers of offshore information system project success. Consequently, the role of relational factors in driving project success has been overlooked in this literature. In this paper, we address this gap by integrating the social embeddedness perspective and the culture literature to theorize h...

We investigate the assimilation of electronic procurement innovations (EPIs) and its impact on procurement productivity in buyer organizations. We identify online reverse auctions, electronic catalog management, electronic order fulfillment, and electronic payment and settlement as moderate complements for the performance of the procurement process...

Despite continued rapid growth in the outsourcing of supply chain services, long-term relationships between vendors and customers are challenged by the need to create sustainable value from the relationship. Our research suggests that the ability of client firms to align their collaboration modes and IT capabilities with their objectives for the ve...

The outsourcing literature has offered a plethora of perspectives and models for understanding decision determinants and outcomes of outsourcing of business processes. While past studies have contributed significantly to scholarly research in this area, there are an insufficient number of studies that explore how information systems can be used to...

This research-in-progress article reports on an ongoing investigation that explores the transition from RFID-enabled transactional systems to RFID-enabled strategic systems in healthcare settings. By adopting a comparative case study approach and a process oriented perceptive, this research explores the underlying causal mechanisms that shape trans...

We conceptualize two distinct post-acceptance usage behaviors: (1) routine use (RTN) refers to the use of information system (IS) consistent with normal work processes and (2) innovative use (INV) means users' applying system features in novel ways. While RTN helps integrate the implemented IS into work processes, INV further extracts the value of...

The study will cross-fertilise Information Systems (IS) and Services Marketing ideas through reconceptualising the information system as a service (ISaaS). The study addresses known limitations of arguably the two most significant dependent variables in these disciplines - Information System Success or IS-Impact, and Service Quality. Planned effort...

Value nets are the architecture of sourcing agreements and alliances that firms implement to gain complementary resources and capabilities from other firms. They (ire a source of innovation, growth, and competitive success. However, governing value nets is challenging, and the IT support needed to enable them depends on the governance mode a firm c...

Although past research has investigated the impact of exploration and exploitation on firm performance, there is limited research on these effects in interorganizational relationships. We examine whether the boundary condition for ambidextrous learning can be extended from firms to long-term interorganizational relationships. Specifically, we focus...

Firms are looking to leverage information technology (IT) to develop higher order capabilities that span the extended enterprise, such as demand-supply synchronization for agile response in volatile markets. In this study, we examine two global firms that are both driven to become orchestrators of their respective global business networks, where pr...

This paper presents a model for investigating digitally-enabled process innovations and their impact on business network performance. The key features of the model are its focus on innovation across business networks and the assumption that benefits of investments in IT are most likely to occur when mediated by innovations in related business proce...

Controlling information technology (IT) projects is a prime concern for both project managers (PMs) and users, yet little is known about how key risks affect the relationship between controls and performance. Based on data collected on 128 completed IT projects, we examine the moderating effects of requirement and user risk on the relationship betw...

Digital inequality is one of the most critical issues in the knowledge economy. The private and public sectors have devoted tremendous resources to address such inequality, yet the results are inconclusive. Theoretically grounded empirical research is needed both to expand our understanding of digital inequality and to inform effective policy makin...

While researchers go to great lengths to justify and prove theoretical links between constructs, the relationship between measurement items and constructs is often ignored. By default, the relationship between construct and item is assumed to be reflective, meaning that the measurement items are a reflection of the construct. Many times, though, th...

Cooperative logistics relationships require the sharing of information, which must be enabled by the integration of disparate information systems across partners. In this article, we theorize business-to-business logistics relationships should be managed using cooperative and competitive postures. Based on data from 91 dyadic relationships using in...

This special issue of Information Systems Research includes six papers that investigate the role of information technology for the management of the extended enterprise in the global economy. These papers contribute to our theoretical and practical understanding of how IT is restructuring occupations and industries and how firms can leverage IT for...

Escalation of commitment to a failing course of action is an enduring problem that remains central to the study of managerial behavior. Prior research suggests that escalation behavior results when decision makers choose to ignore negative feedback concerning the viability of a previously chosen course of action. Previous work has also suggested th...

This study focuses on the organizational adoption of Executive Information Systems (EIS). A distinction is made between two related, complementary EIS capabilities—EIS for collaboration support (EISc) and EIS for decision support (EISd). EISc is relatively standardized and replicable, while EISd has to be developed in situ given the specific charac...

A large-scale random sample is used to empirically examine the relationships between implementation of Advanced Manufacturing Technology (AMT) and three organization-level measures that have historically been attributed to AMT, but not fully tested along the AMT spectrum: market-oriented flexibility of the production process, organizational integra...

Intense competition in the marketplace is forcing organizations to examine different ways by which they could enhance or retain their competitive edge. Strategic alliance is one such option through which an organization can leverage its resources to emerge as an effective competitor. Such alliances are burgeoning in the information technology indus...

The literature offers a multitude of modeling and assessment techniques to represent differing enterprise stakeholder perspectives and interests in business process innovation. While each technique yields valuable insights into possibilities for innovating business processes, these insights are limited as they are derived from a particular perspect...

Across the global economy, we are witnessing a dramatic transformation toward a services economy. At the same time, advances in information technologies provide significant opportunities for digitization of services and the development of services management thinking within the information systems community. This note aims to stimulate attention to...

Best practice exemplars suggest that digital platforms play a critical role in managing supply chain activities and partnerships that generate performance gains for firms. However, there is limited academic investigation on how and why information technology can create performance gains for firms in a supply chain management (SCM) context. Grant's...

A new model of competition, where competition is among supply chain networks rather than individual firms, is transforming traditional market-based buyer-supplier relations to one of competition among cooperative sets. In order to integrate and realize performance gains from participating in cooperative supply networks, the importance of informatio...

Electronic procurement innovations (EPI) have been adopted by many firms as a means of improving their procurement efficiency and effectiveness, but little research has been conducted to determine whether the assimilation of EPI really increases procurement productivity and which factors influence its assimilation. Drawing on data from 166 firms, w...

Digital inequality is one of the most critical issues in the knowledge economy. The private and public sectors have devoted tremendous resources to address such inequality, yet the results are inconclusive. Theoretically grounded empirical research is needed both to expand our understanding of digital inequality and to inform effective policy makin...

The importance of managing the extended enterprise is a recurrent theme, and many consider supply chains to be the next frontier of opportunities to improve profitability and competitive advantage for organizations. Building on prior work that has identified the value creation capabilities of integrated digital platforms and relational conditions,...

The “Networked Economy” describes alliances of firms that manage globally distributed supply networks. In the best of all worlds, this interactive flow of information among member firms will result in efficient and effective balance of supply and demand. Unfortunately, supply networks suffer from poor and inexact information, and, in the worst case...

Enabling Business Agility Through Information Technology Management Full Text at Springer, may require registration or fee

Digital inequality, or the unequal access and use of information communication technologies, inhibits under-privileged people from opportunities in the digital world. Although government and private organizations have devoted considerable resources to address this inequality, issues remain unsolved. A theory-based investigation of the phenomenon is...

Intelligent networks are emerging as a class of supply systems that permit extreme customization and serve-to-order (i.e., minimal inventory) responsiveness by co-integrating product design, process redesign, and networkwide control mechanisms (Rai, Bush et al., 2002; Rai and Sambamurthy, 2002). The airlines in-flight services involve a globally di...

Understanding software project risk can help in reducing the incidence of failure. Building on prior work, software project risk was conceptualized along six dimensions. A questionnaire was built and 507 software project managers were surveyed. A cluster analysis was then performed to identify aspects of low, medium, and high risk projects. An exam...

P> For decades, information technology has been posited to have a major impact on firm performance. Investigations into this line of inquiry have almost always used constructs related to individual firm performance as their dependent measures, an approach that made sense under historical economic conditions. In recent years, however, value chains a...

To reduce the high failure rate of software projects, managers need better tools to assess and manage software project risk. In order to create such tools, however, information systems researchers must first develop a better understanding of the dimensions of software project risk and how they can affect project performance. Progress in this area h...

To reduce the high failure rate of software projects, managers need better tools to assess and manage software project risk. In order to create such tools, however, information systems researchers must first develop a better understanding of the dimensions of software project risk and how they can affect project performance. Progress in this area h...

Knowledge management systems and related initiatives have become a popular focus in many firms, yet many knowledge management systems initiatives fail to achieve their goals. Focuses on systems that are implemented to achieve deliberate performance improvement objectives in organizations, rather than to support discretionary communication. Employs...

Improving the capability of the development process has emerged as an important strategy for addressing recurring problems in software development, such as poor quality, high development costs, and long delivery lead times. While a number of normative software process models have been proposed, limited theory development has occurred. This study ad...

Previous research has documented that software projects are frequently prone to escalation. While the escalation literature acknowledges that project-related (as well as psychological, social, and organizational) factors can promote escalation behavior, there has been no investigation regarding the role that project management factors may have in d...

Previous research has documented that software projects are frequently prone to escalation. While the escalation literature acknowledges that project-related (as well as psychological, social, and organizational) factors can promote escalation behavior, there has been no investigation regarding the role that project management factors may have in d...

In this paper we examine how Internet technologies are useful in managing thin (amount of knowledge is low) and thinly distributed (density of expertise is low) medical knowledge. Our specific focus is to highlight the usefulness of the Internet in managing such knowledge, and that the nature of the “basket of Internet technologies” used to manage...