Investigating the co-creation of IT consulting service value: empirical findings of a matched pair analysis

Abstract

Digitalization is increasingly and broadly impacting on companies throughout all industries. To cope with digital transformation, organizations need specific IT skills and often face a bottleneck between required and existing capabilities. Thus, organizations revert to support from IT consultants. However, such collaborations need to create value so as to make client organizations futureproof in the long term. We therefore need a better understanding of how value is created in IT consulting projects. We build on service-dominant (S-D) logic as the theory base and evaluate our structural model, which explains IT consulting service value based on 77 matched pairs of IT consulting projects using structural equation modeling. We provide empirical support for the assumptions of S-D logic in the IT consulting industry and reveal determinants that significantly contribute to the overall IT consulting service value. Our results contribute to the ongoing discourse in the S-D logic literature and provide meaningful insights for practice.

How consumer innovativeness, technological expertise, and consideration set size can explain mobile commerce use: An extended understanding using a moderation–mediation model

“…Our findings are expected to reflect how these two distinctive features can combine to enhance our understanding of attitudes and MCU. Therefore, this study helps to reflect new features and periodic changes ready to be adopted by innovative consumers, especially with high TE, which are not captured in previous studies (Oesterle et al 2020;Zhang et al 2012). It also consolidates the personality-value-attitude-behavior framework (Fishbein and Ajzen, 2010;Ajzen and Fishbein 2000) to improve our knowledge for innovative behaviors such as MCU.…”

“…Online purchasing expertise is also one of the few constructs used as a moderator in recent EC studies but is a relatively underexplored construct in MCU (Wu et al 2016). In addition, TE is suggested to moderate the effect of innovativeness on the co-creation of IT consultant service value and improve customer relationship quality (Oesterle et al 2020). However, the combination of whether and how CI (Kalinic and Marinkovic 2015;Kaushik and Rahman 2015;Lu 2014) and TE (Bransford et al 2000) influence attitudes and MCU are, to our knowledge, not explored in the previous MC literature.…”

“…Furthermore, MC businesses should continually develop and integrate new technologies, for example, recommendation systems based on artificial intelligence and machine learning, to attract innovative consumers, especially those with high TE, and to involve them in the process of value co-creation (Lu 2014). For consumers with low expertise, businesses in the MC environment should also develop consulting services to determine consumer shortages in skills and knowledge and educate them with the expertise needed to reduce their workload (Oesterle et al 2020).…”

“…Different types and measures of expertise have been investigated in the EC literature, such as industry, functional, technological, or social expertise (Oesterle et al 2020;Ziefle and Schaar 2010). Future research should use an objective measure of TE (Ziefle and Schaar 2010) or include other types of IT expertise (Oesterle et al 2020). Furthermore, different factors can affect the formation of CSS in MC (Punj and Moore 2009).…”

From knowledge broker to solution provider in the Industry 4.0 setting: the innovation path of a small consulting firm

“…This creates an emerging “digital divide” among large and small consulting companies engaging with advanced digital projects, such as in the I4.0 setting. Thus, small consulting firms are called upon for developing new skills and know-how both on the business and on the IT side (Bensberg et al , 2019; Oesterle et al , 2020; Benitez et al , 2021) to provide I4.0 solutions for their customers, which are often small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) with limited technological and organizational resources. SMEs tend to involve small – rather than large – consulting firms in digitalization projects, as they offer more customized solutions and adequate assistance in terms of training and continuous feedback.…”