تاثیر شکست های فن آوری اطلاعات بر ارزش بازار شرکت

IT failures abound but little is known about the financial impact that these failures have on a firm’s market value. Using the resource-based view of the firm and event study methodology, this study analyzes how firms are penalized by the market when they experience unforeseen operating or implementation-related IT failures. Our sample consists of 213 newspaper reports of IT failures by publicly traded firms, which occurred during a 10-year period. The findings show that IT failures result in a 2% average cumulative abnormal drop in stock prices over a 2-day event window. The results also reveal that the market responds more negatively to implementation failures affecting new systems than to operating failures involving current systems. Further, the study demonstrates that more severe IT failures result in a greater decline in firm value and that firms with a history of IT failures suffer a greater negative impact. The implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed.

In the summer of 1993, Greyhound Lines rolled out a new reservation system, Trips. The system turned out to be slow and crash-prone, impeding service quality and leading to a 12% drop in ridership. As this development was reported to the market, Greyhound’s stock tumbled nearly 25%. Over the course of a few months, as problems with Trips continued to surface, the stock price dropped another 60 percent (Tomsho, 1994). In 1999, a software glitch brought online auction pioneer eBay’s network to its knees for three days in a row, costing the company an estimated $2 million a day (Li, 1999). Frustrated customers flooded Internet bulletin boards with threats to leave the service. Investors sent eBay stock tumbling almost 10% with more than twice the normal trading volume in the third day of outages.

The strategic management literature has seen a growing interest in understanding the complex relationship between IT and business value. To date, these studies have drawn on RBV to show how IT-based resources can be leveraged to improve firm performance. Previous event studies in this area have examined positive stock market reactions to announcements of strategic IT investment decisions ( Lee et al., 2001 and Uhlenbruck et al., 2006). Our study contributes to this growing body of literature, as well as to the study of IT failure, by examining the value loss associated with actual IT failures, and thus provides a different angle for testing the tenets of RBV. The results of this research show that when IT resources fail unexpectedly, they most definitely have a negative impact on firm value. Indeed, our results show that there is, on average, nearly a 2% decline in market value when firms experience IT failures. This average is greater than the corresponding positive market value effect observed in studies of announcements concerning intra-firm IT investments ( Dardan et al., 2006, Dos Santos et al., 1993 and Oh et al., 2006), with CAR values ranging from 0.09% to 0.36%, and up to 1.03% for a sub-sample.