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An organizational perspective on m-business: usage factors and value determination

  • Empirical Research
  • Published:
European Journal of Information Systems

Abstract

Mobile technologies have increasingly become an integral part of individuals’ work and personal lives. Although research exists in this domain, most of it focuses on the customer’s adoption factors rather than assessing the value or the impact of mobile business (m-business) usage on firms. The present study fills this gap in the literature through the analysis of the value m-business can provide for firms. The Technology-Organization-Environment framework, Diffusion of Innovation theory and Resource-Based theory ground this research’s conceptual model for assessing the post-adoption stages of usage and value of mobile business from an organizational perspective. The value of m-business includes the impact on marketing and sales, internal operations, and procurement. This research uses a mixed method research design; interviews are first conducted to develop a model to assess m-business usage, and survey data collected from 180 Portuguese organizations is then used to test the proposed model. The results indicate that seven of the nine proposed antecedents of m-business usage are significant, and that m-business usage has a positive and significant relationship with m-business value. Furthermore, the three dimensions of value (marketing and sales, internal operations, and procurement) are significant, but only two of them have direct positive impacts on firm performance. Implications of these findings for practice and research are discussed.

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Acknowledgements

This research was partially supported by the national funds of FCT – the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation within the strategic project PEst-OE/EGE/UI4027/2014.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Advance Research Center, ISEG School of Economics and Management of the Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    Winnie Ng Picoto & António Palma-dos-Reis

  2. ACIS Department, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, U.S.A.

    France Bélanger

Authors
  1. Winnie Ng Picoto
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  2. France Bélanger
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  3. António Palma-dos-Reis
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Additional information

An earlier and shorter version of this paper was presented at the European Conference on Information Systems 2012.

Appendices

Appendix A

Study 1 Details

Study 1 involved a series of interviews with m-business implementers or experts.

Respondents

The seven respondents from business organizations worked for one of five firms, named A, B, C, D, and E for maintaining the confidentiality promised to them. They are briefly described below.

  • Firm A is a utility company with over 7000 employees. We interviewed the business consultant involved with the mobility project. The project itself involves providing customized mobile equipment to access personalized real-time utility data.

  • Firm B is a mobile telecommunications organization with approximately 1000 employees and over seven million customers. We interviewed the Director of data, content and roaming services. The main project is meant to provide mobile phones internally to employees and serve as a demo for clients.

  • Firm C is a bank with over 1000 branches and 10,000 employees. We interviewed the Director of Information Systems and the Director of New Channels. The m-business project involves providing mobile devices internally for information dissemination and externally for support of a mobile banking portal.

  • Firm D is in the distribution business. It has over 30,000 employees using m-business and approximately 400 points-of-sales. We interviewed the Director of business development and innovation about a project to provide mobile PDAs to employees in department stores for handling logistical and operational processes and to serve as portals for information dissemination.

  • Firm E is a traditional telecommunications company with more than 2000 employees and a market of 11,000 companies. We interviewed the consultant for mobile solutions and the Director of enterprise solutions. The project was to provide mobile phones and mobile applications to be used both internally and by clients.

High-level protocol questions (further probing was done when appropriate)

  1. 1

    Which of the following mobile business functionalities is your company actually using, and which are the ones you wish to be using?

  2. 2

    What are the main reasons for you to adopt m-business? (is m-business part of your company’s overall strategy?)

  3. 3

    What were the initial goals for your m-business initiatives?

  4. 4

    How much is the total amount expended on m-business initiatives?

  5. 5

    What are the Impacts on the Downstream Dimension (sales)

  6. 6

    What are the Impact on Internal Dimensions (internal operations)

  7. 7

    What are the impacts on Upstream Dimensions? (procurement)

  8. 8

    Are there other impacts that m-business have in your company that were not mentioned yet?

  9. 9

    Are there any aspects of m-business that you want to comment on?

Additional questions pertaining to demographics and characteristics of firms are not included.

Appendix B

Measurement Items

3

Appendix C

Pilot Test of the Formative Measurement Model

To assess multicollinearity, Variance Inflation Factors (VIF) were computed. All formative latent variables, excepted SI, II and PI, were lower than the cutoff value of 3.3 (Petter et al, 2007; Cenfetelli & Bassellier, 2009; Henseler et al, 2009). For SI, II, and PI, we followed the suggestions of Bido et al (2010) and Cenfetelli & Bassellier (2009). First, we conducted a conceptual validation and then a correlation analysis for items considered to capture a same domain. As a result of these analyses, the indicators SI2, SI4 and SI6 were deleted from the latent variable Impact on Sales and Marketing dimension; II2, II4, II5, II6, II8, II9, II13 and II14 were deleted from the latent variable Impact on Internal Operations; and finally, PI3 and PI5 were deleted from the latent variable Impact on Procurement. Despite these deletions, the meaning and theoretical validity of three formative constructs SI, PI and II were not harmed.

For formative validity, the estimated weights of formative variables should be significant (Henseler et al, 2009). In PLS, some of the indicators (i) were not significant and (ii) showed a co-occurrence of negative and positive indicator weights in a same latent variable. To deal with this problem, Cenfetelli & Bassellier (2009, p. 696) suggest the researcher could ‘keep all indicators forming a single construct and include a discussion of the absolute contribution of the indicators. If the indicator remains non-significant across multiple studies, researchers should interpret this as evidence against the conceptual foundations for its inclusion’. Following this suggestion, we kept all items that resulted from the pilot study after deleting the ones mentioned in the prior paragraph. Given it is the first time the constructs TC, PP, ME, SI, II and PI are being measured, we kept the constructs as defined since they were well grounded in the existing literature and in Study 1.

Appendix D

Study 2 Details

In this appendix, we report the results for the reflective and the formative measurement models in Tables D1, D2, D3, D4.

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Picoto, W., Bélanger, F. & Palma-dos-Reis, A. An organizational perspective on m-business: usage factors and value determination. Eur J Inf Syst 23, 571–592 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/ejis.2014.15

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