Antecedents of Dynamic Capabilities and IT-dependent Initiatives in the Context of Digital Data

Firms automatically and continuously capture a high amount of digital data (DD) through social media, RFID tags, smart meters, sensors, etc. However, empirical evidence on the effects of the generation of such digital data on firms remains scarce in the information systems literature. Therefore, from two complementary perspectives, i.e., dynamic capability and IT-dependent initiatives, this paper examines the antecedents of companies’ ability to leverage DD, which we refer to as DD dynamic capability and DD initiatives, and investigates whether this ability directly leads to better data accessibility. We empirically test our hypotheses based on a survey from 178 firms, which include sales and IT managers, and we find that the antecedents have specific influences on both DD initiatives and DD capability, such that all the antecedents support the initiatives; however, only organizational processes strengthen DD capability. Furthermore, DD initiatives and DD capability improve the accessibility of DD. Our results show that organizational processes of sensing, coordination, integration and learning emerged as the most important sources of Dynamic Capabilities DCs - by contrast, the firm’s assets and history played only a marginal, supporting role.