The moderating effect of a chief information officer's competence on IT investment and firm performance

Abstract

With the uncertainty of market environment and variety of customer requirements, an increasing number of organizations are implementing Information Systems(IS) to improve their competitive advantage, and large amounts of firms' annual revenues are invested in Information Technology (IT) resources each year. However, research findings determining the impacts of IT on firm performance reveal conflicting results, which leads to an "IT productivity paradox". Drawing upon Resource Based View(RBV) and Knowledge Based View(KBV), this paper analyzes the important role that a Chief Information Officer (CIO) has in IS implementation and deployment, and proposes a conceptual model to examine the moderating effect of CIO's competence on IT investment and organization performance. By analyzing the existing managerial competence framework, CIO's competence has been reconceptualised and divided into six sub-dimensions. The moderating effect of each competence has been illustrated and six hypotheses have correspondingly been established. It is proposed that a research methodology encompassing open and closed ended question surveys will be pursued to examine the model, and their theoretical and practical implications are discussed. The main contribution of this research paper is the re conceptualization of a CIO's competence and a theoretical conceptual model based on RBV and KBV to explain the phenomenon of "IT productivity paradox".