Whose job is it anyway?: organizational information competencies for value creation

Research highlights that most business managers continue to be dissatisfied with the value they perceive they are deriving from their organization's information systems investments. On examining the literature, the dominant perspective is that creating value through information systems is primarily the responsibility of the IS function. Accordingly to address this chronic malaise, attention generally focuses on the IS function with proposed prescriptions ranging from reskilling the IS professional through re-engineering the IS function to the ultimate sanction of outsourcing. This paper examines the problem of value creation from IS investments from an organizational as opposed to an IS functional perspective. Drawing on resource-based theory the paper argues that the effective deployment and exploitation of information should be viewed as a 'strategic asset'. To leverage value from IS, the paper proposes that organizations must recognize and develop information competencies and that the elements of these competencies are distributed throughout the organization and not solely resident in the IS function. Through a multimethodological approach these information competencies are identified and described. The resultant competencies are then studied in an organizational context. The paper ends by drawing conclusions and articulating further research directions and opportunities.