Do e-business investments create competitive advantage: Perspectives from the Australian banking and financial services industry

Abstract

Are advantages provided by e-business vanishing as IT becomes ubiquitous and affordable? Is it losing its strategic value and, therefore, its potential for strategic differentiation? This paper proposes a conceptual framework to assess strategic IT investments for e-business. The framework captures several business, human and time dimensions. It is argued that the interaction of these dimensions with IT is hard to be imitated by competitors, and has therefore, the potential to generate and sustain competitive advantage. We attempt to answer these questions by using the perspectives of IT practitioners in Australian financial service industry in the first of a multistage study.