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The strategic management literature emphasizes the concept of business intelligence (BI) as an essential competitive tool. Yet the sustainability of the firms’ competitive advantage provided by BI capability is not well researched. To fill this gap, this study attempts to develop a model for successful BI deployment and empirically examines the association between BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage. Taking the telecommunications industry in Malaysia as a case example, the research particularly focuses on the influencing perceptions held by telecommunications decision makers and executives on factors that impact successful BI deployment. The research further investigates the relationship between successful BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage of the telecommunications organizations. Another important aim of this study is to determine the effect of moderating factors such as organization culture, business strategy, and use of BI tools on BI deployment and the sustainability of firm’s competitive advantage.

This research uses combination of resource-based theory and diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory to examine BI success and its relationship with firm’s sustainability. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and a two-phase sequential mixed method consisting of qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed. A tentative research model is developed first based on extensive literature review. The chapter presents a qualitative field study to fine tune the initial research model. Findings from the qualitative method are also used to develop measures and instruments for the next phase of quantitative method. The study includes a survey study with sample of business analysts and decision makers in telecommunications firms and is analyzed by partial least square-based structural equation modeling.

The findings reveal that some internal resources of the organizations such as BI governance and the perceptions of BI’s characteristics influence the successful deployment of BI. Organizations that practice good BI governance with strong moral and financial support from upper management have an opportunity to realize the dream of having successful BI initiatives in place. The scope of BI governance includes providing sufficient support and commitment in BI funding and implementation, laying out proper BI infrastructure and staffing and establishing a corporate-wide policy and procedures regarding BI. The perceptions about the characteristics of BI such as its relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, and observability are also significant in ensuring BI success. The most important results of this study indicated that with BI successfully deployed, executives would use the knowledge provided for their necessary actions in sustaining the organizations’ competitive advantage in terms of economics, social, and environmental issues.

This study contributes significantly to the existing literature that will assist future BI researchers especially in achieving sustainable competitive advantage. In particular, the model will help practitioners to consider the resources that they are likely to consider when deploying BI. Finally, the applications of this study can be extended through further adaptation in other industries and various geographic contexts.

This paper aims to explore the role of structural‐organizational capital (or intelligence) in gathering, producing and transmitting competitive intelligence (CI) to enhance organization competitive advantage.

A questionnaire‐oriented survey covering 200 Iranian companies as samples was conducted to collect data for the study.

The findings indicate that the information systems (as the structural capital) and the content factors (as the organizational capital) of the structural‐organizational intelligence (SOI) are significantly related in attaining CI. The study also provides empirical evidence that attaining CI is positively related to organization competitive advantage.

First, the companies chosen for the study were mainly large companies. Thus, the results may not be applicable to smaller companies; second, this survey was limited to one country (Iran); third, 40 percent of the respondents were from state companies, which because of using state budget and being active at the monopolistic markets inside the country might be a negative effect on the amount of using SOI.

Future studies might be extended to analyzing the relationship among other factors of intellectual capital and CI and should seek to utilize multiple respondents from multinational companies to enhance the research findings.

The paper provides some of the very first insights into development of structural capital concept and its effects on organization. Previous studies were independent of structural‐organizational capital (intelligence). This study aims to fill that gap by studying downstream impact of SOI application on both the admission of CI information and organization competitive advantage.

Matrix structures are complex and conflict prone, so multinational enterprises (MNEs) would utilize them only if they conferred some advantage over less complex organizational structures. Based upon the information-processing view, a theory of matrix advantage is proposed. It is supported by a secondary analysis of data from a major study of German MNEs. Matrix structures are shown to have an advantage over the elementary structural types. Specifically, the matrix structures fit higher levels of transnational strategy than elementary structures. Transnational strategy is assessed by two concepts: firm internationalization (involvement in foreign sales, manufacturing, and research and development (R&D)) and corporate integration (intracompany transfers). Moreover, three-dimensional matrices are associated with higher levels of transnational strategy than are two-dimensional matrices, confirming the gains from having additional structural dimensions. Matrix structures arise because of the need to simultaneously fit high levels of both firm internationalization and corporate integration. Matrices fit the transnational strategy type of Bartlett and Ghoshal. Implications are drawn for the relationship between the head office and the subsidiary. The matrix often subjects the subsidiary to conflicting expectations from the head office, which it can attempt to manage. Similarly, the head office is challenged by the task of integrating the information that comes from different dimensions of the matrix.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and empirically examine a comprehensive model that attempts to identify the factors that explain competitive advantage of implementing electronic business (e-business) in an emerging market. It seeks to fulfill an inevitable lack of conducting rigorous and intensive empirical studies on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in which the internet use and e-business applications are on the rise.

This research is descriptive in nature where a quantitative research methodology is deployed. Data are collected using both interviews and e-survey for a sample of 302 Egyptian companies serving in diverse industries. A multivariate partial least squares technique is employed to analyze the collected data.

This study explores various e-business modes and applications widely employed in the MENA region. It also addresses a set of e-business-driven competitive advantages that are mainly generated from supportive ICT environment, major market forces and strategic opportunities, and at last, from electronically driven customers’ relationship initiatives. A number of e-business barriers are claimed to moderate the relationship between those forces and the resulting competitive advantages.

Although this research main framework incorporates important variables based on theoretical and empirical foundations, integrating other factors may extend understanding of how these factors, independently and/or interactively, explain the adoption of e-business and its merit to create distinctive competitive advantage.

This work helps managers and e-business experts alike to comprehend the ways through which firms target the applications of e-business technologies to realize a competitive edge in MENA region. It also helps practitioners and professionals comprehend the interrelationship between the type of forces drive e-business based competitive position and key barriers that deteriorate such a connection in emerging markets.

A model that enables scholars to better understanding the e-business phenomenon in MENA market is developed and validated. This model rests on e-business experts’ perspectives, reflections and it is evidently substantiated by past works in the areas.

This paper aims to explore how fund managers (FMs) deal with major problems of ignorance and uncertainty in stock selection and in asset allocation decisions.

Interviews were conducted with 40 fund managers in the period October 1997 to January 2000. A seven stage approach was adopted to sift through and process the large volumes of case data. The interview case data formed the basis for identifying common patterns and themes across the cases.

The case data revealed the nature of this private information agenda concerning intellectual capital or intangibles and the dynamic connections between these variables in the value creation process. The case data provided insight into how the book value and market value gap arose and the special role of information on intangibles and intellectual capital in valuing the company.

The fund management behaviour has important implications for regulatory policy issues on insider information, on corporate disclosure, the corporate governance role of financial institutions, and for the governance of financial institutions.

The paper focuses on issues of importance in an increasingly concentrated and global FM industry.

A producer of a long line of related products developed a product‐cost information system that helped the company understand its cost structure and use it as a basis for its pricing, promotion, and sales‐incentive programs. The result is a profitability advantage that competitors still do not understand. • Merrill Lynch developed a computer information system that allowed it to offer a new product—the “Cash Management Account.” In the four years it took competitors to develop similar systems. Merrill Lynch gained 400 thousand new customers and $14 billion in newly held assets. • Dun & Bradstreet systematically assesses its voluminous computer data bases for ideas concerning how information can be created and combined to form new product offerings. • An office products firm developed a competitor information system that permits it to compile and correlate such accurate data on competitors that one manager finds he often knows more about his competitor's business than they do.

Based on the theory of social networks, it is crucial to enhance information superiority through joint venture capital (VC). The purpose of this paper is to explore the impacts of different roles’ structural and relational embeddedness on the information superiority of joint VC alliances.

The authors design the multiple linear regression models to investigate the leader’s investment ratio from a network embeddedness perspective. Panel data analysis and robustness tests are adopted based on the data from Chinese VCs Database.

The results show that VC leaders enjoy information search advantages because of their better network positions, while their followers lack this superiority. Information sharing among investors and investees may enhance the influences of structural embeddedness on investors’ information search advantages. Joint VC’s scale and its number of leaders could also increase VC alliances’ information superiority.

This research provides a more holistic understanding of the formation of joint VC alliances’ information superiority from a social network perspective. Both VC managers and social planners can seek guidance from this study to implement better strategies and policies to promote information symmetry in the VC market.

When a valuable new technology emerges, it provides forward‐looking companies with opportunities for gaining a strong and durable edge over the competition. But as the technology matures and standardizes, it loses its power to provide competitive advantage. What it doesn’t lose is its power to destroy advantage. The rail system, for example, neutralized many of the traditional locational advantages held by companies situated near ports, mine heads, and population centers. With information technology, this neutralizing effect promises to be particularly strong – and thus poses particularly difficult challenges for business executives. Because IT is so flexible in its application and so deeply entwined with business processes, it can corrode advantages across many aspects of a company’s business. Any traditional advantage in prosecuting a particular activity or process, from setting type to designing components to providing customer service, will tend to dissipate as that activity or process is automated. The fact that competitive advantage has become more difficult to sustain doesn’t make it less important, as some have argued; it makes it more important. As business processes and systems become more homogeneous, only the strategically astute companies will be able to rise above the competitive free‐for‐all. Today’s smart managers will seek to combine sustainable advantages (those built on distinctive and defensible positionings) with leverageable advantages (transitory advantages that provide stepping stones to future advantages). In the information age, competitive advantage needs to be viewed as both an end and a means.

This paper presents the major findings of recently completed research in the UK concerning the attributes of information as an asset and its impact on organisational performance. The research study employed an automated information asset- and attribute-scoring grid exercise and semi-structured open-ended interviews with 45 senior UK managers in four case study organisations. The information asset-scoring grid was developed to provide a simple visual representation of information assets and attributes using Excel charts. The semi-structured open-ended interviews aimed to identify the attributes of information assets considered significant by 45 senior UK managers and to explore relevant issues such as the value of information and organisational effectiveness.

One lesson of the 1970s was that the power and influence of retailers and distributors is a highly significant factor in many practical marketing situations. Currently, however, the nature of retailer power is in the process of changing as a result of new information technology, which has the effect of increasing dramatically the existing structural advantages of retailers in access to marketing information. This article considers the sources of informational power for retailers, predicts the nature of retailer information strategies and develops a model of the marketing information system which transcends the organisational boundaries of a single firm — the channel marketing information system. The objective of this discussion is to attempt to clarify the possible responses to retailer information advantage, both tactically in the short term, but also rather more importantly at a strategic level in the longer term.