Business Value of Information Sharing and the Role of Emerging Technologies. Business Value of Information Sharing and the Role of Emerging Technologies.

Information Technology has brought significant benefits to organizations by allowing greater information sharing within and across firm boundaries leading to performance improvements. Emerging technologies such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web2.0 have transformed the volume and process of information sharing. However, a comprehensive understanding of how information sharing beyond firm boundaries results in business value is still lacking. This dissertation explores the business value of information sharing beyond firm boundaries and the role of emerging technologies in driving the business value.The dissertation consists of three related parts. The first part builds a taxonomy and research model of business value of information sharing beyond firm boundaries. This provides a broad framework for studying the phenomenon and identifies research gaps. Two empirical studies then follow to address two of these research gaps. The first empirical study is a cross-sectional analysis that looks at information sharing with suppliers and the impact of SOA in moderating the impact of transparency and complexity of information sharing processes on supply chain efficiency as measured by inventory and accounts payable. Results show that SOA use mitigates the negative impact of complexity of information sharing process on supply chain performance. However, SOA use also reduces the positive impact of information sharing transparency. The second empirical study is a longitudinal analysis that considers an Internet based peer to peer financial market and the decision making by market participants based on shared information. The results show that the group decision making has significant error compared to an efficient benchmark. The quality of decision making improves with time as a result of learning and with increase in information availability. The study shows that improvement in quality of decision making follows a punctuated equilibrium model.This dissertation contributes to research by building an inter-disciplinary research model of business value of information sharing beyond firm boundaries and studying the impact of process characteristics, technology architecture and decision making processes on business value of information sharing. Dissertation results provide a framework for future research and for managers to design and manage information sharing beyond firm boundaries using emerging technologies.