Conceptualizing the Organizational IT Artifact via the Construct of Organizational Integration

Drawing on the concept of organizational integration, we developed a typology that allows us to classify organizational IT applications and better understand, explain, and potentially predict their impacts. As a preliminary test of the typology, the empirical evidence of past research on the impacts of IT on organizational performance was reviewed. We classified the organizational IT applications that were studied in previous work according to our proposed typology and compared their results on IT impacts against the impacts hypothesized in our proposed framework. The proposed framework correctly predicted 87% of past significant findings and 51% of the non-significant findings of extant research (the overall prediction rate was 76%). This is a significant improvement in our predictive abilities as none of the latter studies had hypothesized non-significant effects of IT on performance.