Editorial

摘要

Welcome to the final issue of Volume 23 of The Journal of Strategic Information Systems. In this issue, we have four papers dealing with a variety of strategic issues as they relate to information and communication technologies. As is to be expected from a journal that incorporates the former journal, International Information Systems, we have a wide range of nationalities represented in this issue, with authors associated with institutions in no less than eight countries contributing, namely: Australia; Canada; The Netherlands; Portugal; Slovenia; South Africa; the UK, and the USA. Their papers deal with questions and concepts that have been at the heart of the strategic information systems literature for many years -such as the Resource-based Theory and questions of IS/IT acceptance and utilization, specifically in relation to emerging technologies, as well as wider societal issues that have received less coverage until more recently. We begin with a paper by Peter Seddon, from the University of Melbourne, Australia, which is titled, "Implications for Strategic IS Research of the Resource-based Theory of the Firm: A Reflection". Seddon, to use his words, "turns conventional logic of empirical testing of RBT on its head". He argues that, all that such testing can do is to identify "valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable (VRIN) resources". In taking this perspective, his aim is to produce recommendations as to how RBT could usefully be applied to future IS research. This he achieves through an examination of the IS literature from the RBT perspective, thereby identifying those resources that do appear to have been sources of competitive advantage in the ICT context. As such, the paper extends the research published in JSIS that applies RBT and considers its use in future studies. Prior JSIS papers on aspects of the topic include those by Rivard et al. (2006), that considers the contribution of IT to company performance, and Tarafdar and Gordon (2007) that considers the influence of information systems competencies on process innovation.