Empirical investigation of the relationship between use and impacts of collaborative information technologies

Abstract

Collaborative information technologies (CIT) to support groups working together or collaborating to accomplish tasks is becoming increasingly popular. Practitioner reports suggest that collaboration can have a significant influence on business performance and can lead to a sustained competitive advantage in a turbulent global environment (Frost and Sullivan, 2006). However, despite the large investments that organizations have been making in CIT (Hansen and Nohria, 2004), recent empirical evidence suggests that the utilization of CIT in organizations across five global regions is surprisingly limited and it generally does not meet the expectations of the practitioner and academic communities, in spite of substantial efforts of organizations to make such technologies available/accessible to their end-users (Bajwa et al., 2008). Is it plausible that CIT use may not have substantial impacts or lead to impacts that are not desirable to organizations? Our research focuses on addressing this research question through a large-scale macro-level investigation.