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Introduction
Companies that invest in information and communication technology (ICT) have a common question to answer. Do investments in ICT really improve supply chain performance? Numerous failures in practice have put doubt on this seemingly easy to answer question. It seems that ICT does have an impact on supply chain performance, but our understanding of how some companies do obtain positive results and others do not, is unclear. The main thrust of this paper is that inter- and intra-organizational ICT play a different role in the improvement of supply chain performance. The use of inter-organizational ICT (that connects organizations through electronic linkages) leads to more supply chain integration which in turn improves performance, whereas intra-organizational ICT (ICT within an organization such as ERP) improves the quality of information and as such acts as a condition for effective supply chain integration.
The interrelationships between ICT, supply chain integration and supply chain performance have received extensive attention within the literature. Although, overall the literature seems to suggest that ICT has a positive effect on performance, it is hard to say if and how individual technologies or types of ICT technologies affect specific performance measures. In a review of the literature, Zhang et al. (2011) conclude that the ambiguous role of ICT in supply chains originates from the diversity in ICT constructs and technologies that are incorporated in the different research models. This paper contributes by explicitly recognizing the distinctive roles of inter-organizational ICT and intra-organizational ICT in order to understand if and how ICT affects supply chain performance.
Typically, studies that incorporate both intra-organizational ICT and inter-organizational ICT to capture the effect of ICT on supply chain performance do not present consistent, significant findings (e.g. Li et al., 2009; Jeffers et al., 2008). In contrast, studies that only incorporate inter-organizational ICT seem to offer more consistent findings. A few studies found that inter-organizational ICT has a direct effect on supply chain performance (Da Silveira and Cagliano, 2006; Frohlich and Westbrook, 2002). Other studies show that inter-organizational ICT directly helps to improve integrative practices such as information sharing (e.g. Paulraj et al., 2008) or coordination between partners (e.g. Vickery et al., 2003; Prajogo and Olhager, 2012), and subsequently improves supply chain performance (Vickery et...