Dissertation Defense Announcement

Fogelman College of Business and Economics announces the Final Dissertation Defense of

Sungjin Yoo

for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

June 26, 2019 at 2:00 PM in Fogelman College of Business and Economics,Room 365

Advisor: William J. Kettinger & Chen Zhang

New Organizational Challenges in a Digital World: Securing Cloud Computing Usage and Reacting to Sharing Economy Disruptions

ABSTRACT: Information technology (IT) and IT-enabled business models are transforming the business ecosystem and posing new challenges for existing companies. This two-essay dissertation examines two such challenges: cloud security and the disruption of sharing economy business models. The first essay examines how an organization's usage of cloud storage affects its likelihood of accidental breaches. The quasi-experiment in the U.S. healthcare sector reveals that organizations with higher levels of digitalization or those with more IT applications running on their internal data center are less likely to experience accidental breaches after using public cloud storage. We argue that digitalization and operational control over IT applications increase organizations' awareness and capabilities of establishing a company-wide security culture, thereby reducing negligence related to physical devices and unintended disclosure after adopting cloud storage. The usage of cloud storage is more likely to cause accidental breaches for organizations contracting to more reputable or domain expert vendors. We explain this result as the consequence of less attention being focused on securing personally accessible data and physical devices given high reliance on reputed and knowledgeable cloud providers. This research is among the first to empirically examine the actual security impacts of organizations' cloud storage usage and offers practical insights for cloud security management. The second essay examines how Sharing Economy Platform Business Model Prevalence (SEPBMP) affects the performance implications of industry incumbents' competitive actions. SEBMP represents the amount of third-party products and services that originally were unavailable inside the traditional business model but now are orchestrated by sharing economy companies in an industry. We use texting mining and econometrics approaches to analyze a longitudinal dataset in the accommodation industry. Our results demonstrate that incumbents' competitive action repertoires (i.e., action volume, complexity, and heterogeneity) increase their performance when the SEPBMP is high but decrease incumbents' performance when the SEPBMP is low. Practically, incumbents who are facing a greater threat from sharing economy firms can implement more aggressive competitive action repertoires and strategically focus on new product and M&A strategies. This research contributes to the literature of both competitive dynamics and sharing economy platforms.