An organizational perspective on m-business: usage factors and value determination

Mobile technologies have increasingly become an integral part of individuals’ work and personal lives. Although research exists in this domain, most of it focuses on the customer’s adoption factors rather than assessing the value or the impact of mobile business (m-business) usage on firms. The present study fills this gap in the literature through the analysis of the value m-business can provide for firms. The Technology-Organization-Environment framework, Diffusion of Innovation theory and Resource-Based theory ground this research’s conceptual model for assessing the post-adoption stages of usage and value of mobile business from an organizational perspective. The value of m-business includes the impact on marketing and sales, internal operations, and procurement. This research uses a mixed method research design; interviews are first conducted to develop a model to assess m-business usage, and survey data collected from 180 Portuguese organizations is then used to test the proposed model. The results indicate that seven of the nine proposed antecedents of m-business usage are significant, and that m-business usage has a positive and significant relationship with m-business value. Furthermore, the three dimensions of value (marketing and sales, internal operations, and procurement) are significant, but only two of them have direct positive impacts on firm performance. Implications of these findings for practice and research are discussed.