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This article takes issue with Nick Carr’s thesis, developed in his book and in articles for Harvard Business Review and the Journal of Business Strategy, that IT has become a commodity. The thesis, write the authors, draws upon a straw man argument based on analogy and gross simplification of the nature of IT investment. Carr argues that IT has become a commodity, much as railroads and electricity became in the past, and therefore it cannot possibly produce competitive advantage. But IT is different from earlier technologies in two fundamental ways. First, its growth and change potential is unprecedented and still continues, and second, it is the most versatile and flexible technological platform the human race has ever created. Carr also fails to emphasize how much more important IT has become as a consequence of its ubiquity in executing successful business strategies. Telling people that they won’t obtain competitive advantage from IT will lead them to pay less attention to it, leading to worse results, and a self‐fulfilling prophecy. IT will indeed become incapable of contributing to competitive advantage. Yet it is very difficult to find examples of large scale strategic successes and failures in the past decade in which IT was not a contributor to the result.

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 research aims to discuss the success of digital transformation focusing on the role of IT and management commitment in digitalization together with sectorial relevance as influencing factors. According to the literature, these dimensions are key elements of digitalization, and there is no consensus on their decisiveness. The authors measure the success of digital transformation with the digital innovation. The research is part of ongoing work, in which the IT-related practice of Hungarian organizations has been explored on an annual basis since 2009.

The research methodology is a combined one; both qualitative and quantitative methods were applied including surveying digital transformation literature, interviews with key representatives of Hungarian organizations, developing a survey to collect quantitative data, data collection and processing with PLS-SEM.

The results revealed that the digital innovations are strongly determined by business, management commitment and, to a far lesser extent, by strategy. In the case of digital transformation, the role of IT departments and the services they provide are less relevant.

The most important limitation of the research is the size and composition of the sample. Results do not present the situation of a specific industrial sector.

Digital technologies influence and disrupt practically every industry; the development of information and communication technology has changed economies all over the world. Decisive factors of digital transformations are widely researched, but there is no consensus about them. This research contributes to understanding the role of IT department and their services in this process together with leadership, sectorial relevance as influencing factors.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, academic libraries revived their tradition of working with readers, which resulted in a surge of publications in this area. However, the nature and thematic coverage of these publications has not changed dramatically in the past 18 years, signaling little advancement in the reach and scope of this professional activity. This paper aims to address the following research problem: What do citation patterns reveal about reading research and practice in academic libraries and do they point to interdisciplinary research and the presence of an evidence base or do they carry a mark of an inward disciplinary orientation?

This is a qualitative exploratory study, also involving descriptive statistics, that uses bibliographic and citation analysis as a method.

The study discovers a disconnect between the diversity of interdisciplinary research cited in the published work on reading in academic libraries and the sameness of respective professional practices; it describes a relatively small community of reading researchers in academic libraries, emerging as leaders who can change the direction and scope of reading practices; and it highlights a preference of academic librarians for relying on interdisciplinary knowledge about reading over building on the readers’ advisory experience of public librarians.

Translating the incredible wealth of interdisciplinary reading knowledge possessed by academic librarians into practical applications promises to advance and diversify reading practices in academic libraries. One method that could aid in this effort is more intentional learning from the readers’ advisory practices of public librarians.

Small and mid‐sized enterprises (SMEs) are facing challenges in an increasingly fierce environment. This paper aims to explore the promise of information systems (IS) in enhancing the survival and competitiveness of SMEs in a dynamic environment. To address this issue, the paper draws upon the dynamic capability theory and develops a research model of IS‐enabled dynamic capabilities to examine the role of IS competence for enhancing SMEs dynamic capabilities in a competitive business environment.

An empirical study is conducted by using survey data from senior managers of 120 SMEs in China.

The analytic outcomes support the research model and confirm that IS competence significantly contributes to SMEs' dynamic capabilities for gaining competitive advantage.

This paper contributes to the literature on IS impact on dynamic capabilities of SMEs by incorporating IS competences into a research model of IS‐enabled dynamic capabilities and articulating the relationships between IS competences and dynamic capabilities of SMEs in a changing business environment. The research findings enrich dynamic capabilities theory by justifying IS as an enabling antecedent for organizational capability development. The findings may empirically convince SMEs owners and management to effectively invest in and deploy IS for enhancing SMEs' dynamic capabilities and performance.

A capability‐building perspective is used to examine how IS can leverage SMEs' capabilities to enhance their competitive advantage in a dynamic environment.