ERP, e-Commerce, Social Media and Absorptive Capacity of Greek Firms: An Empirical Investigation

The absorptive capacity (ACAP), defined as firm's ability to identify useful knowledge in its external environment, assimilate it, transform it and finally apply it for achieving firm's objectives, has become quite important for the achievement of high financial performance of firms, and even their survival, and in the rapidly changing, competitive and 'knowledge intensive' modern econo-my. It has been recognized that information and communication technologies (ICT) can be quite useful for the enhancement of firm's ACAP. However, there has been no empirical investigation of the effects of the main types of information systems (IS) current-ly used by firms, aiming at efficiency improvements, on their ACAP. This paper makes a contribution towards filling this research gap, by empirically investigating and comparing the effects of the use of three important types of IS, the ERP and e-commerce ones, and also a recently emerged one, the social media (SM), on the ACAP of Greek firms. Our study is based on data collected through a survey from 122 Greek firms from both manufacturing and services sectors. It has been concluded that the use of ERP systems affects positively firms' ACAP, while this does not hold for the e-commerce ones. Furthermore, the use of external and internal SM both affect positively the ACAP, with the effect of the former being the strongest among the three examined IS types.