Conversion Barriers with Mobile Service

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may be more inclined to use mobile services, and they may expect higher value from those mobile services than older organizations. Hypothesis H3b is as follows:

H3b: Organization age has a negative effect on the potential value of mobile services.

Organizational culture is also a key factor that affects a firm’s decision to invest in an innovation. Today, the new innovative market tendency is toward mobility and service orientation. Additionally, if senior managers in an organization such as the CEO recognize these market trends, they are more likely to adopt mobile services and perceive that the benefits of the service outweigh the risks. Then, the firm will be more likely to adopt the mobile service. Consequently, our hypothesis here is as follows:

H3c: Organizational culture has a positive effect on the potential value of a mobile service.

IT-business alignment can aid stakeholders in developing a clearer understanding of the goals and objectives of the project at the outset and can maximize the potential return on IT investment (Huang and Hu, 2007).Particularly now, in the information explosion age, firms take customer service seriously. If they aim to increase the productivity and efficiency of customer service representatives and enhance customer service value, the firms that want to gain competitive advantage will recognize the value of new IT innovations such as mobile service technology: they may help the firm to fulfill their need to transform an enormous amount of data into a reliable source, correct related customer information, access real-time customer information, and more. Because mobile service technology allows these firms to fulfill their business needs, the technology is more aligned with their business goals. Thus, hypothesis H3d is as follows:

H3d: A lack of business alignment has a negative effect on the potential value of a mobile service.

3.3 Conversion Barriers with Mobile Service

The conversion process includes resource barriers, knowledge barriers, and usage barriers. Based on the literature review in Chapter 2, three co-specialized resources related to mobile services are mobile knowledge, mobile operations, and mobile objects. We use absorptive capacity (Zahra and George, 2002) to discuss how firms

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can use their acquisition, assimilation, transformation, and exploitation capabilities to digest external knowledge through new mobile technology. Last, we use the perspective of actual usage to determine the usage barriers of mobile services.

3.3.1 Resource barriers 3.3.1.1 Mobile knowledge

We define mobile knowledge as the firm’s ability or know-how as necessary to improve the success of mobile service investment. Mobile knowledge is also the source of core knowledge that can increase the value of mobile technology. Mobile knowledge assets are managed by mobile knowledge management (mKM) in mobile corporate environments with the support of appropriate mobile information technologies (Zuopeng and Sajjad, 2008). The increasing mobility of the workforce and knowledge pose new challenges for organizations as they seek to effectively manage knowledge and develop more flexible modes of communication, collaboration, and information-sharing.

Thus, a firm that has mobile knowledge can access and analyze external information comprehensively on mobile devices in both knowledge-intensive and mobile environments and thereby obtain useful knowledge and mobile value anytime and anywhere. In other words, a lack of mobile knowledge means that the firm does not have the ability or know-how to handle mobile information, and this will negatively affect the realized value of a mobile service after use, even if the firm expects a high level of value from that mobile service. Therefore, we work from hypothesis H4a:

H4a: A lack of mobile knowledge has a negative moderating effect on the relationship between the potential and realized value of mobile services.

3.3.1.2 Mobile operations

In addition to mobile knowledge to show the mobile type of IT knowledge resources, mobile operations are critical for IT operations with mobile issues. Slilva and Gray (2008) argue that the current mobile environment and the organizational structure as necessary to push mobility forward and achieve the benefits of mobile services will require more centralized strategy and be controlled by mobile operations today. Thus, when mobility increases in complexity, multiplying the mobile hardware, software, and services in which an organization regularly invests and that it must support, the role of mobile operations — as a subset of IT operations — will emerge as a central point of expertise and control many aspects of organizational mobility. Therefore,

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firms have mobile operations to align all elements that are critical to ensuring that mobility continues to benefit the organization and to manage outside mobile networks.

Because mobile operations can be viewed as a process controller for mobility, companies cannot realize the value of mobile services without them. Hence, we develop hypothesis H4b:

H4b: A lack of mobile operations has a negative moderating effect on the relationship between the potential and realized value of mobile services.

3.3.1.3 Mobile objects

Mobile objects are made up of important IT objects that facilitate and support mobile applications, including mobile technological infrastructure, mobile handheld devices, and mobile technical support for human resources. Mobile technological infrastructure (e.g., Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), Bluetooth, 3G, and General Packet Radio Service (GPRS)) provides connectivity in the mobile world (Varshney and Vetter, 2000; Perry et al., 2001; Nah et al., 2005). Mobile handheld devices such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) have increased the sophistication and popularity of mobile technology and drive organizations to change the way they support mobile and remote workers (Technology Computer Weekly, 2005). Besides, mobile services cannot succeed without the mobile technical support for human resources. Therefore, even if companies expect a high level of value from mobile services, they will not be able to realize that level of value if they lack essential IT objects. Thus, hypothesis H4c is as follows:

H4c: A lack of mobile objects has a negative moderating effect on the relationship between the potential and realized value of mobile services.

3.3.2 Knowledge barriers

Knowledge barriers spring from limited information processing capabilities on the part of employees and lacks of absorptive capacity and organization learning over time, as the related knowledge and expertise are not acquired (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990; Attewell, 1992; Asahi, 1995; Chircu and Kauffman, 2000; Zahra and George, 2002). The same principle applies to the newly mobile service market. If a firm possesses both organizational learning and innovation capabilities in this mobile era, it can decrease the knowledge barriers based on information-sharing, training and learning, facilitate the absorption of external innovative knowledge, and make organizational resources more accessible, shareable and valuable through new mobile

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innovations. On the other hand, a firm without the above capabilities will encounter knowledge barriers that inhibit the realization of a higher value of mobile service after use and thus will have difficulty creating competitive edge in the mobile economy.

That is to say, although the high potential value of mobile services can lead to a high level of realized value, a lack of organizational learning and absorptive capacity will reduce the extent to which value can be realized. Therefore, we develop hypothesis H5:

H5: Knowledge barriers negatively moderate the relationship between the potential and realized value of mobile services.

3.3.3 Usage barriers

According to the previous discussion of usage, we know that actual usage has often been identified as a key construct influencing the business value generated from IT, even in mobile services. Vrechoupoulos et al. (2003) suggest that complicated use affects the realization of mobile service value. Sinisalo and Karjaluoto (2009) assert that the degree of mobile service usage is related to mobile phone capabilities including SMS, WAP, MMS, XHTML and HTML. Moreover, smartphone users exhibit more actual usage of mobile data communication. With this in mind, we argue that firms may not realize the value of mobile services if they are not appropriate for use. Thus, we develop hypothesis H6:

H6: A lack of actual usage has a negative moderating effect on the relationship between the potential and realized value of mobile services.

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