Asia Pacific Journal of Information Systems (APJIS)

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Current Issue

Date	December 2018
Vol. No.	Vol. 28 No. 4
DOI	https://doi.org/10.14329/apjis.2018.28.4.240
Page	240~257
Title	The Effect of Cloud-based IT Architecture on IT Exploration and Exploitation: Enabling Role of Modularity and Virtuality
Author	Insoo Son, Dongwon Lee, Gwanhoo Lee, Youngjin Yoo
Keyword	Cloud-based IT Architecture, IT Exploitation, IT Exploration, Modularity, Virtuality
Abstract	In today’s turbulent business landscape, a firm’s ability to explore new IT capabilities and exploit current ones is essential for enabling organizational agility and achieving high organizational performance. We propose IT exploration and exploitation as two critical organizational learning processes that are essential for gaining and sustaining competitive advantages. However, it remains unclear how the emerging cloud-based IT architecture affects an organization’s ability to explore and exploit its IT capabilities. We conceptualize modularity and virtual-ity as two critical dimensions of emerging cloud-based IT architecture and investigate how they affect IT explora-tion and exploitation. We test our hypotheses using data obtained from our field survey of IT managers. We find that modularity is positively associated with both exploration and exploitation whereas virtuality is positively associated with exploration, but not with exploitation. We also find that the effect of modularity on exploitation is stronger than its effect on exploration.