Journals Proceedings

Abstract

Examining the relationship between IT capability and firm performance has received ample attention of researchers. However, a sound understanding of how to define IT capability remains underrepresented in existing literature. We extend and modify an existing definition analysis method derived from the Social Sciences and divided each definition in four components: central phenomenon, context, action and consequence. The components serve as basic requirement that help to identify causal explanations from a definition. We analyzed 24 definitions and weighted the relevance of each component using the five-year mean impact factor derived from the Association of Business Schools. To check the robustness of our results, three alternative weights were applied: journal grade, equal weights and citation per article. Our results show that researchers do not define all four components and, contrary to earlier studies, our definition analysis method is able to utilize all words of a definition