Information technology, organization change and firm productivity: A panel study of complementarity effects and clustering patterns

Organizational change (OC) is an important complementarity factor in the process of creating business value from information technology (IT) investments.. This paper investigates complementarities between IT capital and OC initiatives of the firm. It analyzes the productivity impact of different clusters of IT and OC in the manufacturing and services sectors of the economy. Three dimensions of OC are studied: process, structure, and boundary changes. Two distinct econometric approaches are applied to a unique and detailed sample of 32,619 firm-level observations in the Netherlands for the period 1994-2006. The results reveal that the productivity effect of IT significantly increases when technology investments are accompanied by relevant organizational changes. The observed complementarity effects between IT and OC are stronger for services than for manufacturing firms. The effects become stronger if different types of change are combined with each other and form clusters.