Research on IT value: what we have done in Asia and Europe

European Journal of Information Systems (2007) 16, 196–201. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ejis.3000666 Introduction With trillions of U.S. dollars spending on information technology (IT) annually by organizations and individuals worldwide, what value IT can bring to the society is no doubt a big issue in research and practice. Surprisingly, not much has been done in this critical area, especially in Asia and Europe. One possible explanation is that IT value is such a broad term or concept that can encompass different things to different people. Another reason is that the information systems (IS) discipline in Asia and Europe is young compared to that in North America. Although with a tremendous growth in IS research in Asia, particularly in China, in the past decade or so (Chau et al., 2005; Zhang et al., 2006), there is still a long way to catch up. The theme of the Ninth Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS 2005) is ‘IT and Value Creation’. It focuses on the roles, functions and impacts of information and communication technologies on creating sustainable value, which can be created by a number of innovative business computer applications ranging from efficient management information systems to innovative decision support or e-business technologies. This special section includes three papers that examine the issue from different perspectives: business adoption of B2B exchange, extended use of complex information systems by employees and use of innovative IT by customers in the retail industry. Before introducing these three papers, we would like to present a snapshot of IT value research done in Asia and Europe in the past decade. In this editorial, we first examine and compare IT value research in Asia and Europe. We chose to use papers published in the proceedings of two major information systems conferences in Asia and Europe, respectively, namely Pacific-Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS) and European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) as the subjects of the examination and comparison because they are the most representative IS conferences and thus provide a good snapshot of IS research undergoing in the regions. In the next section, we first provide a literature review on IT value research with the objective of ‘setting the stage’ of our subsequent data analysis. With Seddon et al.’s (1999) review article on ‘Dimensions of Information Systems Success’ as a basis, a taxonomy of IT value research is proposed. An examination of the papers published in the conference proceedings of PACIS (from 1993 to 2005) and ECIS (from 2000 to 2005) is then conducted by looking at the dimensions of IT value being studied, research methods, unit of analysis and type of data used, etc. Discussion on what and where we can go in terms of IT value research is then presented. We conclude with a brief description of the papers selected from PACIS 2005 for this special section.