افزایش تجزیه و تحلیل بهره وری با داده کاوی: یک برنامه کاربردی در ارزش کسب و کار IT

In this paper we use a large firm-level dataset to extend previous studies by augmenting the endogenous growth accounting framework with a data mining technique to analyze the complex relationships between the use of IT and organizational practices. There is emerging evidence of recent emphasis on organizational factors and a greater shift towards “IT complementarities” in which value addition is linked to combining complementary organizational practices with IT investments. Our findings indicate that the set of interrelated organizational practices that complement positively to IT use is different from the set of practices hindering IT use. The presence of clustering among organizational practices clearly implies that some combinations of practices make it difficult to precisely empirical examine. We have found that our technique was able to show some organizational factors may have different pathways to affect organizational performance and such organizational practices have often been overlooked but can play a weak yet non-trivial role in production and organizational processes.

In the mid-1980s, Robert Solow1 and others argued that there was insufficient evidence to link the massive investments in information technology (IT) to productivity growth. This phenomenon which came to be known as the productivity paradox has since emerged as an important research topic for economists, information systems researchers, and management theorists. Since then, a range of models and methods has emerged (Brynjolfsson and Hitt, 1996 and Lehr and Lichtenberg, 1998). However, there are still considerable variations in the findings on productivity impacts attributable to IT investments. Stiroh (2004) analyzed the extensive econometric literature on the economic impact of IT and found that much of the observed variation in estimates of the impact attributable to IT is due to differences in model specification and analytical technique. Earlier disappointing results suggested that while IT was a critical technology in organizations, it was modeled inadequately (Brynjolfsson & Yang, 1996). Recent studies have suggested that important organizational practices were often omitted in the productivity analyses, and the time-consuming nature of many organizational changes would take a much longer time to observe (Brynjolfsson & Hitt, 2003). These studies have highlighted that more nuance analytical techniques are needed to enhance our understanding of the complementarities of the technology-organizational phenomenon. The concept of “complementarities”2 can offer a useful perspective to study the complex relationships between organizational practices and the use of IT. In 1990s, Milgrom and Roberts, 1990 and Milgrom and Roberts, 1995 proposed the concept of “web of complementarities” which marked a paradigmatic in conceptualizing other complex dynamics among organizational practices. Previous studies have contributed to our understanding of whether and how complementary relationships among organizational practices lead to significant increases firm-level performance. However, the model construction is still a critical problem in studying complementarities due to the following three reasons. First, complementary factors need to be considered simultaneously. Second, the levels of impacts can vary significantly between different configurations. Third, there can be many possible complex forms of relationship structure among the complementary factors. This is due to the fact that model construction requires identification of potential input factors, in addition to the relationship structure of those potential factors. Therefore, there is a need to model the complex inter-relationship structures of the potentially complementary factors. In this paper, by combining the use of data mining and econometric techniques, we attempt to explore the impacts of complementary relationships between a large set of organizational practices and use of IT at the firm-level. The aim is to highlight a set of fundamental issues that are critical to understanding the mechanisms by which IT interacts with organizational practices. We propose a new approach to deal with the fractal like, interlocking nature of organizational practices and IT, which can potentially produce higher returns.

We have argued that while traditional theory-driven productivity analysis enjoy the benefit of strong established theory, but such approach also suffers from certain limitations particularly when there is limited knowledge about the underlying pattern of the interrelations among organizational practices and their complex inter-relationships. This paper aims to discover the organizational factors complementary to IT that would lead to excess productivity growth. A methodology and its limitations to systematically integrate the data mining process with various statistical techniques have been presented. Data mining has been applied with the goal of refining the existing theoretical approach in production economics, such that new insights into the complex dynamics of use of IT and organizational practices can be explored. There are a number of possible extensions to this study. First, the finding of this study calls for a renewed focus on the role of IT in the studies of organizational innovation. Second, from an analytical viewpoint, there is need for a broader range of measures of IT and related organizational inputs to extend this line of research. Third, it would be useful to replicate the research using datasets from other countries to see if similar trends can be reproduced.