Development and validation of application capability of e-business

Despite substantial discussion of the impact of B2B e-business on organizational performance, there is an absence of a theoretical study on the development of e-business systems capability. The purpose of this research is to addresses this void in the IS literature by proposing a new concept-application capability of e-business (ACEB) based on the resource-based view and IT process-oriented approach. We identified six dimensions of the ACEB, and empirically validated these six theoretical to construct with data from 152 Chinese manufacturing firms. Our empirical results suggest that the newly developed scale has good reliability and validity. Our findings also suggest the existence of proposed first-order and higher-order construct structure. By distinguishing two levels of IT capabilities, i.e., e-business systems capability and application capability of e-business, this study suggests that the range of IT capabilities must be widened and deepened. We believe this study is one of the first studies which contain a rigorous conceptualization and measure to make the theoretical construct development and empirical validation of ACEB.