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Top1. Introduction
Modern firms across a wide range of industries and sectors are constantly seeking competitive potential in order to improve customer efficiency, firm effectiveness, and transform the organization toward a sustainable and evolutionary fit business model driven by organization-wide innovations (Dao, Langella, & Carbo, 2011; Hanelt, Busse, & Kolbe, 2016; Seidel, Recker, & Vom Brocke, 2013). The adoption, effective use, and alignment of information systems and information technology (IS/IT) are critical in this respect (Hanelt et al., 2016; Malhotra, Melville, & Watson, 2013; Melville, Kraemer, & Gurbaxani, 2004; Wade & Hulland, 2004). However, various scholars have argued that firms need to deal with various complexities arising from aligning business operations and IS/IT domains (Sabherwal, Hirschheim, & Goles, 2001; Wegmann, 2002), while also taking into account the dynamics of the environment (Eisenhardt & Martin, 2000; Teece, Pisano, & Shuen, 1997) and continuous organizational change (Brown & Eisenhardt, 1997). It has been well documented in the literature that this particular process complements the leveraging of idiosyncratic and intangible resources to build competences (Wernerfelt, 1984), i.e., the internal oriented resource-based view (RBV) of the firm. The dynamic capabilities theory (DCT) extended this rather static RBV (Teece et al., 1997) and embraced environmental influences and market dynamism (Wang & Ahmed, 2007). Eisenhardt and Martin (2000) observed that dynamic capabilities can could be effective if they match the rate of environmental changes and not all enterprise-level responses to external stimuli are manifestations of dynamic capabilities (Winter, 2003). Moreover, Henderson and Venkatraman stressed that alignment, as a dynamic capability, is not an ad-hoc event, but rather a process of continuous adaption and change. As such, they argued that ‘no single IT application—however sophisticated and state of the art it may be—could deliver a sustained competitive advantage’ (Henderson & Venkatraman, 1993). It is also within this particular context that IT capabilities and scalable enterprise IS/IT infrastructures have been proposed as a means to achieve a competitive edge (Duncan, 1995; Kim, Shin, Kim, & Lee, 2011; Tiwana, Konsynski, & Bush, 2010).