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In today's world where big data and artificial intelligence are deeply integrated, data has become the core asset of corporate development. With continuous breakthroughs and widespread applications in AI technology, the value of data has risen to unprecedented heights. Nearly all enterprises are now committed to leveraging data analytics to extract valuable business insights.

[Financial Times Chinese column] Submarine cables carry approximately 99% of the global intercontinental data flow, making them crucial for the development of digital economy. The Chinese government has emphasized the need to accelerate digital infrastructure development in its "14th Five-Year Plan," promoting the "Digital Silk Road."

Supply chain agility has been recognized as a key capability for firms working to achieve superior performance in uncertain business environments. Supply chain agility is challenging to achieve, however, because it requires the firm and its supply chain partners to collaborate closely yet flexibly across organizational boundaries. Extending the boundary object literature to the supply chain context, this study unveils the mechanism through which interorganizational systems (IOS), widely deployed to span organizational boundaries through interfirm digital connections, promote supply chain agility in uncertain environments. The concept of supply chain collaboration is introduced as the mediating mechanism between two key IOS characteristics (i.e., standardization and adaptability) and supply chain agility. Environmental uncertainty is…

Faced with uncertainty when choosing among a wide range of similar competing technologies, users often take a herding in technology adoption (HTA) strategy to make heuristic adoption decisions. The HTA strategy brings users cost and time savings and casts doubt on user staying power. The extant adoption research has long focused on user satisfaction with the performance of the chosen technology (also known as the expectation-disconfirmation theory perspective) but does not sufficiently account for the consideration of the decision process across competing alternatives. To fill this void, this research uses a holistic post-adoptive evaluation by introducing a regret perspective in relation to competing technologies. Specifically, we theorize and operationalize a new multidimensional construct of post-adoption regret…

Sharing economy platforms are pressed to rapidly grow user bases at the early stage by aggressively targeting potential users through competitive actions. Due to the volatile nature of the sharing economy and its disruption to industry norms, these platforms encounter legitimacy challenges that impede user base growth. This paper integrates competitive repertoire and institutional legitimacy theories to develop a research model that explains early-stage user base development in the sharing economy. We posit that the early-stage user base is associated with structural characteristics of the competitive repertoire, whose effects are moderated by a platform's socio-political legitimation efforts that address stakeholders’ regulatory and normative concerns. Using a comprehensive sample of 4644 monthly…

Contemporary IT project teams demand that individual members generate and implement novel ideas in response to the dynamic changes in IT and business requirements. Firms rely on multidisciplinary, geographically distributed IT project teams to gather the necessary talent, regardless of their locations, for developing novel IT artifacts. In this team context, individuals are expected to leverage dissimilar others’ expertise for creating ideas during idea generation (IG) and then implement their ideas during idea implementation (II), known as the IGII process. Although much has been done to explain individual creativity, the extant literature offers little theoretical understanding on how to address the double-edged effects of dispersions in both functional expertise (ExpDisp) and geographical locations (GeoDiss)—the two…

Professor Yulin Fang is a seasoned scholar, professional case writer, veteran IT consultant, and editor for several internationally renowned journals. Seeing HKU Business School as a supernova in the academic landscape, Professor Fang is keen to contribute his intellectual might on digital innovation and transformation to our School’s journey of excellence.  Joining us in September 2021, Professor Fang will be leading our School’s newly formed research centre, the Institute of Digital Economy and Innovation (IDEI).  

Information technology (IT) outsourcing relationships today are facing increasingly turbulent environments. With rapid changes in technological, commercial, societal, and regulatory landscapes, client firms have to closely and continually assess the desirability and appropriateness, or legitimacy, of their vendors in such dynamic settings. In this research, the focus is on client firms’ perceived legitimacy of vendors, termed “vendor legitimacy.” Specifically, building on institutional theory, vendor legitimacy is conceptualized as consisting of three dimensions—pragmatic, moral, and cognitive—and is examined through their respective impacts on IT outsourcing performance. The role of key governance strategies for managing vendor legitimacy, namely, contractual governance and relational governance, are likewise…

In today’s environment characterized by business dynamism and information technology (IT) advances, firms must frequently update their enterprise information systems (EIS) and their use policies to support changing business operations. In this context, users are challenged to maintain EIS compliance behavior by continuously learning new ways of using EIS. Furthermore, it is imperative to businesses that employees of a functional unit maintain EIS compliance behavior collectively, due to the interdependent nature of tasks that the unit needs to accomplish through EIS. However, it is particularly challenging to achieve such a collective level of EIS compliance, due to the difficulty that these employees may encounter in quickly learning updated EIS. It is, therefore, vital for firms to establish effective managerial principles to…