Development and Validation of Scales to Measure the Strategic Potential of IT-Enabled Resources: A Resource-Based Approach

This paper describes the development of reliable and valid scales for assessing the strategic potential of IT-enabled resources. Following to the resource-based view of the firm (RBV), the strategic potential of organizational resources may be assessed by four resource attributes - value, rarity, inimitability, and non-substitutability. The RBV contends that these four attributes provide a link between organizational resources and performance, at the level of the firm. While resource attributes are a central and critical element of resource-based logic, they have not been systematically operationalized. This paper presents a set of measures with satisfactory psychometric properties that can be adapted by researchers and managers to assess the strategic potential of multiple types of IT-enabled resources. The measures are tested using survey data from 150 customer service managers who recently implemented an information technology. The attribute measures were able to explain 54% of the variance in firm performance.