Service-Oriented Architectures

Although strategic alliances and information technology (IT) have become central components of firm strategy, there has been to date no empirical examination of the firm-performance effects of IT investment in the context of strategic alliances. We argue that IT and service-oriented architectures (SOA) are likely to create value through enhanced dynamic capabilities of resource configuration and opportunity detection. We test our theoretical framework by examining the influence of IT investment and flexible IT infrastructure, through SOA, in the effect of alliance activity on firm performance. We utilize data from 375 firms that are publicly listed in the United States and that span multiple industries. These firms have collectively engaged in more than 8,000 alliances over a period of 10 years. We find that the contribution of joint ventures to firm value increases with investment in IT and in SOA. We also find that the impacts of IT and SOA are greater in the case of joint ventures than in non-equity alliances