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This paper lays a foundation for analysing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the concept of the business value of information technology (BVIT) to assess whether it has led to a change in aspects of making IT investments and their importance. Digital technologies helped companies to cope with the disruption that the COVID-19 pandemic induced and have enabled them to emerge stronger from the crisis. The pandemic accelerated the digitalisation of companies by forcing them to introduce IT systems abruptly in order to maintain business operations. Meanwhile, the analysis of the BVIT remained unobserved. The concept of BVIT represents the economic impact of IT on organisational performance and is a frequently discussed topic with a variety of approaches. Using a Grounded Theory (GT) approach to investigate the research field on the basis of existing papers resulted in nine propositions. The results suggest that the main aspect for making IT investments switched from increasing competitive advantage during the pre-pandemic period, to assure business continuity through building business resilience. Business resilience corresponds to a company’s ability to maintain its organisational functions despite occurring disruptions. This thesis takes a step towards analysing and visualising the dependencies and cause-effect chains between company characteristics, company capabilities, and suitable IT investments. Furthermore, the results indicate that established BVIT approaches are not able to capture the IT value added in the form of mediating factors such as strategic flexibility, risk avoidance, or long-term growth. All in all, this thesis represents a substantiated basis for further analysis of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the concept of BVIT, following the derived propositions. submitted by Simon Kroissmayr, BSc Masterarbeit Universität Linz 2023 |
