Companies have heavily invested in information management (IM) capabilities, yet many of them find it hard to demonstrate a business focused strategic value. Consequently, IM functions often get treated as cost-center rather than strategic value creators. This study is intended to address this gap by designing and validating a model to link IM initiatives to business outcomes. We develop and validate a framework that links certain IM capabilities to intermediate organizational capabilities, which subsequently affect financial and strategic performance. The IM capabilities under consideration are data quality governance, analytical infrastructure, data accessibility, and master data management. Through a mixed-methods approach utilizing paired survey data from 350 organizations and archival performance data, we do structural equation modeling to test the proposed relationships. Our results show that the strongest effect on operational efficiency comes from data quality governance (β = 0.47, p < 0.001). Meanwhile, cross-functional data accessibility exerts high impact on strategic agility (β = 0.52, p < 0.001). The mediation analysis confirms that IM capabilities influence financial performance only through organization capabilities. Our research contributes to theory and practice by providing (1) an empirically validated causal model extending the Resource-Based View to the domain of the digital context, (2) a measurement instrument for assessing IM value drivers, and (3) a managerial framework for prioritizing IM investments in line with strategic objectives. According to this research, CIOs and CDOs have evidence-based tools to rebrand IM as a technical necessity for better version.
Masa'deh et al. (Thu,) studied this question.