Content Infrastructure Management: Results of an empirical study in the print industry

257 Pages·2006·1.94 MB·English

by  Alexander Benlian (auth.)

Alexander Benlian
Content Infrastructure Management
GABLER EDITION WISSENSCHAFT
Markt- und Unternehmensentwicklung
Herausgegeben von
Professor Dr. Dres. h.c. Arnold Picot,
Professor Dr. Professor h.c. Dr. h.c. Ralf Reichwald und
Professor Dr. Egon Franck
Der Wandel von Institutionen, Technologie und Wettbewerb prägt in
vielfältiger Weise Entwicklungen im Spannungsfeld von Markt und
Unternehmung. Die Schriftenreihe greift diese Fragen auf und stellt
neue Erkenntnisse aus Theorie und Praxis sowie anwendungsorien-
tierte Konzepte und Modelle zur Diskussion.
Alexander Benlian
Content Infrastructure
Management
Results of an empirical study
in the print industry
With forewords by Prof. Dr. Dres. h.c. Arnold Picot
and Prof. Dr. Thomas Hess
Deutscher Universitäts-Verlag
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Dissertation Universität München, 2006
D19
1. Auflage Mai 2006
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Foreword
Information and communication technologies are leading to new forms of collabora-
tion and interaction relationships inside and outside of companies. With regard to
media companies, this impact is tremendous as resources, products, and processes
are virtually immaterial allowing IT to permeate and restructure the entire value chain.
However, especially in the print industry, where the impact of digitization on organiza-
tion designs and business practices is fervently discussed, companies most often
realize that the degrees of freedom gained by the emergence of new technologies
must be substantiated with rationalistic decision logic. One of the key questions in
media companies is the way how and where digital content should be stored to opti-
mally support primary activities (or core processes). However, state-of-the-art litera-
ture in MIS research falls short of giving answers to this question, as hardly the allo-
cation of hardware, software, or databases has been treated so far – mostly just from
one single (or even no) theoretical perspective.
These research deficits are taken up by the work at hand, which basically pursues
two objectives: the description and explanation of content allocation arrangements in
publishing companies. Based on a research framework that integrates strategic, eco-
nomic, and contingency-based perspectives, Mr. Benlian examines the relevance
and significance of different explanatory factors for the distribution and integration of
media content. Empirical evidence is obtained from the rigorous method of structural
equation modelling which assesses the suggested hypotheses by evaluating sample
data collected from a questionnaire-based survey of 115 German publishing compa-
nies. The research findings are promising: Content allocation is primarily influenced
by technological factors. Specific strategic and operational variables, however, do
also play a significant role, whereas the investigated organizational variables have
less impact. At the end of the work, practical guidance is given by providing IS man-
agers with a benchmark against which they can reassess the design of their own
content allocation configuration.
Altogether, this research work represents a sizable contribution to the discussion of
centralizing or decentralizing digital resources in media companies, as new explana-
tory aspects are introduced and different theoretical perspectives are combined to
shed light on the allocation problem. For that reason, I hope that this work is going to
receive the response in academia and practice it deserves and that it helps compa-
nies to align their content infrastructure according to the specific contingencies they
are facing.
Prof. Dr. Dres. h.c. Arnold Picot
Foreword
Content reutilization is a crucial concept in the slowly emerging theory of media man-
agement. It encompasses the idea and the conditions under which original pieces of
content are bundled and redeployed across several product lines on the production
side and across several distribution channels on the market side of media compa-
nies. Multi-Channel or Cross-Media Publishing, Online Content Syndication and Win-
dowing are just few examples for media management concepts in which content re-
utilization plays a pivotal role. Content reutilization thus represents a cornerstone in
media companies’ increasingly important digitization strategies. Current empirical
findings back up this trend in the media industry: More than 50% of German and
more than 60% of US print publishers have already adopted the most common con-
tent reutilization practices with a tendency towards even higher penetration rates in
the near future.
Despite the growing adoption and support of this management concept, one may not
forget that the implementation of content reutilization is only feasible in practice if a
technical infrastructure is provided that efficiently supports complex content work-
flows. Former research endeavors have already performed substantial analyses in-
vestigating the question how media-neutral content should be stored and retrieved by
means of XML and the Semantic Web. The question where content should be allo-
cated according to a comprehensive strategic, organizational, and economic analy-
sis, however, has been neglected in the state-of-the-art literature so far. Exactly this
research gap has been filled by Mr. Benlian’s work, which addresses an important
aspect in the implementation of media companies’ current digitization strategies.
The doctoral thesis at hand is rooted and embedded in the works of the research
group Content Lifecycle Management (CoLiMa) of the Institute for Information Sys-
tems and New Media at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. In general, the
guiding principle of CoLiMa is the transformation of the media industry’s value chain
through information and communication technologies. In particular, CoLiMa investi-
gates and evaluates new content reutilization options along the entire lifecycle of
media content.
By means of a structural model, which is based on a combination of three theoretical
lenses, Mr. Benlian paints a differentiated picture of content allocation behavior in
publishing companies. The descriptive results revealed the predominance of central-
ized content allocation arrangements in today’s and future media companies – a find-
ing that could not be taken for granted especially in the face of predominantly decen-
tralized organization designs in the print industry. The analytical results show that the
type of content and the type of sub-industry (book, magazine, or newspaper) have a
significant impact on the decision on centralized or decentralized content allocation in
media companies. By contrast, transaction costs and organizational variables seem
VIII Foreword
to have no predictive power. The empirical study is grounded in a survey of 115 me-
dia companies of different sub-segments of the German print industry that was con-
ducted in cooperation with the Association of German Book Publishers between
March and May 2005.
In total, Mr. Benlian has provided an above-average dissertation thesis, which pro-
duced relevant findings both from a scientific and practical point of view. Further-
more, it is important to note that Mr. Benlian has chosen a methodological approach
that is common in the international research on the Management of Information Sys-
tems (MIS), but has unfortunately been neglected in the German research discipline
“Wirtschaftsinformatik” so far. Due to these two reasons, I hope that this thesis will
strike a chord in the respective research and management communities.
Prof. Dr. Thomas Hess
Preface
In the face of growing digitization and modularity of content in the media industry,
media companies find themselves challenged to exploit the gained degrees of free-
dom in the management of their most valuable asset. Opportunities abound in reuti-
lizing, bundling and pushing content through diverse media channels leading to
higher returns on investment by spreading out additional revenues over first copy
costs. However, although many scientific works have tackled the problem of properly
allocating data, processing power or IT-related decision rights in the past, no ap-
proaches have taken up the topic of media content allocation so far, leaving re-
searchers and managers in the dark.
The thesis at hand attempts to address this research gap by throwing light on this
pressing issue from various theoretical perspectives. In the first part of the thesis,
different theoretical lenses stemming from the area of Management and Organization
Science are sifted through for their appropriateness of shedding new light on the is-
sue at hand. Hypotheses about content allocation are then deduced resulting in a
structural model which integrates adequate theoretical perspectives. In the second
part, the structural model is examined empirically on the basis of a sample of news-
paper, magazine, and book publishing companies. Eventually, the results and find-
ings of the study are interpreted and synthesized into a big picture distinguishing be-
tween implications for academia and practice.
Besides this short preview of relevant issues in this thesis, which hopefully will
arouse readers’ curiosity at least a little bit, I would like to thank everyone involved in
the development and fine-tuning of this research work. First and foremost, I wish to
express my gratitude to my supervisor Prof. Dr. Thomas Hess who thoughtfully
guided my research endeavors. He has not only accompanied the entire research
process with fruitful advice and inspiration, but also enabled my visiting scholarship
at the School of Information Management & Systems, University of California at
Berkeley, which gave me the opportunity to have enlightening discussions with Prof.
Yale Braunstein. Furthermore, I would like to thank Prof. Hans-Bernd Brosius whose
dedicated comments helped me to improve the design and measurement instrument
of my research study.
Beyond these credits to my academic advisors, I wish to express my gratitude to a
number of people that also supported me during my time at the Institute for Informa-
tion Systems and New Media (WIM). In particular, I want to thank my colleagues Dr.
Bernd Schulze, Dr. Andreas Müller, Dr. Markus Anding, Benedikt von Walter, Dr.
Bernhard Gehra, Michael Samtleben, Thomas Wilde, Florian Stadlbauer, Barbara
Rauscher, Christoph Grau and Dr. Christoph Hirnle for not only being helpful and
supportive in all matters of daily work life, but also in establishing a social environ-
ment that has made my time at WIM very enjoyable. Last but not least, I’d like to give
X Preface
a special thanks to Monica Reitz, Michal Gruninger, Florian Mann, Barbara Ostrup,
Patrick Schmidt, and Stefan Wurm for being a great support in coping with the well-
known difficulties that come along with empirical studies.
This work is dedicated to my wife Nina who is a strong pillar and source of motivation
in my life. She is the main reason why I always remained focused and determined in
my efforts to accomplish such a challenging task.
Alexander Benlian
Overview of Contents
Table of Contents....................................................................................................XIII
List of Figures.........................................................................................................XVII
List of Tables...........................................................................................................XIX
List of Abbreviations................................................................................................XXI
1 Introduction.............................................................................................................1
2 Conceptual foundations.........................................................................................11
3 Causal model specification....................................................................................21
4 Empirical test of the content allocation model.......................................................91
5 Discussion of model findings...............................................................................161
6 Conclusion...........................................................................................................187
Literature.................................................................................................................191
Appendix..................................................................................................................219
Index........................................................................................................................245