LEVERAGING FIRM PERFORMANCE THROUGH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT AND KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT STRATEGY: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF IT-BUSINESS VALUE

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INTRODUCTION
For decades, strategic theory has provided organizations with competitive advantages (Grant, 2010;Wolf & Floyd, 2017). Knowledge and information technology (IT) are the organization's most valuable and strategic resource and to remain competitive (Song, Li and Zhao, 2019; Nguyen, Ngo, Northey & Siaw, 2019). performance outcomes. The KMS created, captured, and shared between businesses is a key predictor of IT strategic alignment (Tallon et  Given the above, we predict that KMS is antecedent of ITSA, BUTI, BPP and FP: H1: Knowledge management strategy is positively associated with IT strategic alignment. H2: Knowledge management strategy is positively associated with the benefits of IT use. H3: Knowledge management strategy is positively associated with business process performance. H4: Knowledge management strategy is positively associated with firm performance.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT
Researchers have studied ITSA extensively in the last thirty years (Coltman et al., 2015;Gerow et al., 2015). More specifically, researchers have explored how the alignment of IT-related processes generates business value for a firm (Kim et al., 2011;Tallon et al., 2019). Generally, IT alignment and business processes occur in a continuously adjusting synergistic relationship, integrating business strategy and IT assets (Queiroz, Tallon, Sharma & Coltman, 2018;Li & Chan, 2019).
Previous studies on IT-asset portfolios (Xue, Ray & Sambamurthy, 2012; Yoshikuni & Albertin, 2017) claim that IT-asset portfolios can facilitate strategic alignment in four ways: infrastructural, transactional, informational, and strategic. According to Aral & Weill (2007) the IT infrastructural component represents the base foundation of shared IT services in multiple contexts in the organization (e.g., serves, networks, laptops, and databases). The IT transactional component relates to how IT assets can automate business-related routine processes (e.g., accounting, shop floor control, purchasing, sales) broad all organization. IT informational application of IT assets refers to those processes that provide information that make it easier to carry out multiple business processes (e.g., decision support systems, business intelligence).
Finally, the use of IT for strategic ends helps a firm to gain advantages in a competitive marketplace (e.g., enterprise performance management). ITSA offers a more "holistic view" (Gerow et  . By incorporating IT resources into business strategies in this manner, firms can be more efficient and realize innovative benefits they may have otherwise missed out on (Tallon, 2008;Xue et al., 2012). So, this alignment creates value for the firm, thereby improving outcomes performance (Melville et al., 2004;Mikalef & Pateli, 2017). Therefore, we offer the following hypothesis: H5: IT strategic alignment is positively associated with benefits of IT use.

THE BENEFITS OF IT USE
A company's capacity to reap the benefits of IT use (BUTI) influences that company's ability to engage in competitive actions ( According to Taher (2012), the BUTI are evident along operational, tactical, and strategic dimensions. Moreover, these benefits can be financial, non-financial, or intangible in nature, but can nonetheless provide value to the organization and affect firm performance (Melville et al., 2004;Yoshikuni and Albertin, 2017).
The operational benefits of using IT are couched in IT's capacity to automate company activities (Li & Chan, 2019; Tallon et al., 2019). As IT assets infrastructure that enables the connection between companies, shares information and data structure, and deployment of the IT value across the enterprise (Aral & Weill, 2007;Yoshikuni & Albertin, 2017).
According to Davenport and Harris (2007), and Davenport, Harris, and Morison (2010), the tactical and strategic dimensions of IT use can be combined to facilitate specific types of analysis. IT can be used to gather data and systemic knowledge that support organizational decision making and plan for future business endeavors (Aydiner et al., 2019b;Mikalef et al., 2019;Tallon et al., 2019). These analyses (and the foresight they provide) inform strategic processes, allowing firms to diagnose, plan, formulate, and implement business strategies in a flexible manner. This allows the organization to adapt to changing business environments as needed (Arnott & Pervan, 2014;Yoshikuni and Albertin, 2018) In summary, IT use can reduce spending, improve productivity, and increase organizational flexibility (Li & Chan, 2019;Tallon, Queiroz, Coltman, & Sharma, 2016;Yoshikuni & Albertin, 2017). A combination of the tactical and strategic applications of IT demonstrates that the use of IT can also provide analytical benefits. These benefits relate to the quality of the information that organizations use to make decisions. As a result, the analytical benefits of IT use can improve organizational efficiency, promote innovation ( So, we propose the following hypothesis: H6: The IT use is positively associated with business process performance. Firm performance Business processes help organizations to realize salient objectives (Kaplan & Norton, 2000;Porter, 1996). Taken together, the realization of organizational goals can be described as corporate performance (Melville et al., 2004;Tallon et al., 2019;Tallon & Pinsonneault, 2011). Process-level performance denotes a range of measures associated with enhancing the operational efficiency of specific business processes. Some of these metrics include securing customers, transforming products, and/or delivering those products or services to customers (Kaplan & Norton, 2000).
Business process performance (BPP) manifests through activities that transform inputs to outputs (Melville et al., 2004;Tallon et al., 2016Tallon et al., , 2019. These activities relate to innovation, operations, and post-sale support (Kaplan & Norton, 2000). Moreover, analytical activities which support organizational decision making (Adydiner et al., 2019; Davenport et al., 2010) are similarly part of business processes, and therefore influence firm performance (Grant, 2010;Kaplan & Norton, 2000). Given the importance of business processes, their quality is a critical predictor of a firm's ability to deliver products and services efficiently (Mikalef & Pateli, 2017;Tarhan, Turetken, & Reijers, 2015). Thus, we predict that business process performance affects a firm's overall performance: H7: Business process performance is positively associated with firm performance. Models of corporate performance use different metrics (i.e., financial, and non-financial) to gauge various outcomes associated with a firm's capacity to achieve organizational objectives (Kaplan & Norton, 2000;Tallon et al., 2019;Yoshikuni & Albertin, 2017). Financial measurements of corporate performance typically evaluate a firm's long-term value, which typically results from the effectiveness with which a firm produces and sells its goods and realizes its strategies (Kaplan and Norton, 2000). Achieving long-term value for shareholders is necessary to understand the needs and conditions that create value for clients. "Customer performance" is a non-financial measure of organizational performance (Yoshikuni & Albertin, 2017) that relates to the attributes of the goods and services a company provides, the relationships that a company cultivates with customers, and the image of the company's brand (Kaplan & Norton, 2000).
This literature review has presented important concepts related to knowledge management strategy, information strategic alignment, the benefits of IT use, and firm performance. In this study, we adopt a processoriented perspective to propose a theoretical model of IT-business value as recommended by Melville

SAMPLE
The target population was a collection of organizations couched in several business sectors, and the respondents in this study include CEOs, VPs, directors, managers, supervisors, coordinators, and business executives involved in their respective company's management. Respondents had between 8 and 30 years of experience in executive management and possessed substantial knowledge of the constructs in the context of their companies. All items were evaluated using a five-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree), representing an interval scale for measuring respondents' perceptions.

PRETEST
The pretest was positive and provided evidence for the quality of the questionnaire. It was administered to personnel in 23 organizations, we exceeded the recommended sample size of 15 (Malhotra, 2006

DATA TREATMENT
Thirty-five questionnaires were returned with missing data and the final sample size (N = 225) satisfies the requirement for partial least squares path modeling (PLS-PM; Henseler, Ringle, & Sinkovics, 2009). The literature on PLS-PM mandates that a sample be no less than 10 times the number of structural paths that predict a given reflective construct (Hair, Hult, Ringle, and Sarstedt (2013), and 225 cases is sufficiently large to produce consistent results in the test of our model.
We used the Mahalanobis distance metric (dM²; Marôco, 2010) to identify outliers in our data, and three cases were removed from subsequent analyses.

STATISTICAL TECHNIQUE
We used PLS-PM because is considered appropriate for this study, it allows the simultaneous estimation of multiple causal relationships between one or more exogenous variables and one or more endogenous (Hair et al., 2013). We performed all PLS-PM analyses with the SmartPLS 2.0 M3 program (Ringle, Wende, & Will, 2005).
Analysis of the sample showed 10% to consist of C-levels personnel, 72% to consist of management and coordination personnel, and 24% to consist of supervisors with the power to make decisions in their respective companies. Table 1 summarize the makeup of the sample in terms of the sector in which they operate, the number of workers they employ. The sample was largely characterized by firms in the services, manufacturing, and finance sectors (87% of companies surveyed). Similarly, organizations with over 500 employees (58%) were more heavily represented in our sample than firms of other sizes.

REFLECTIVE CONSTRUCT
We started analyzing the outer loadings relevance testing according (Hair et al., 2013) in the crossed loads to check the discriminant validity of the model and the outer loading were < 0.40. The convergent validity was evaluated and the square root of the strategy indicator's AVE. Table 2 shows that all AVE and internal consistency (should be higher than 0.70) were acceptable. Most indicators' outer loadings were than 0.70. Moreover, we considered indicators with outer loadings between 0.40 and 0.70, because of increases in AVE and composite reliability above the threshold values suggested by Hair et al. (2013). The indicators have higher factor loadings on their assigned constructs and lower factor loadings on other constructs, thereby indicating discriminant validity (Chin, 1998;Ringle et al., 2014), see Appendix A.

FORMATIVE CONSTRUCT
We analyzed the asses the formative construct's convergent validity by examine global single item (ITSA_G) to test the redundancy analysis and correlation between the construct ITSA and ITSA_G was 0.881 higher than 0.80 that satisfied the test of redundancy analysis according Hair et al., (2013), see Table 3.
We checked the collinearity of indicators and the variance inflation factor (VIF) were lower than 5 and each indicator's tolerance (VIF) were higher than 0.20 and the VIF results are satisfactory, no critical level of collinearity (Hair et al., 2013). Table 3 shows the outer weights and significance tests for all indicators (p < 0.01) (Hair et al., 2013).

STRUCTURAL MODEL
We also applied Chin et al.'s (2013) measured marker variable technique (MLMV) to control for common method bias and used four items designed to have the least possible logical correlation with other constructs under investigation. Results of the MLMV analysis showed that no differences in the value of R square, suggesting that common method bias was unlikely to be a significant concern for this study.
We evaluated the respective influences of all control variables on the model's endogenous variables and sector and size demonstrated no statistical significance (p > 0.05). Figure 2 shows the adjusted model with non-significant MLMV removed. All numerals next to the paths represent structural path coefficients.

THE MEDIATING EFFECT OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT
To begin the mediation analysis, we estimated the relationship between KMS and BUTI without including ITSA as a possible mediator. We also estimated the association between KMS and FP without including BPP as a mediator.
The value of variance accounted for (VAF) indicates the size of the indirect effect in relation to the total effect (Hair et al., 2013). According to Hair et al. (2013), when the VAF is less than 20%, (almost) no mediation takes place. In contrast, when the VAF is greater than 80%, one can assume a full mediation. When the VAF is between 20% and 80%, then partial mediation is the likely result. The presence of significant indirect effects led us to conclude that ITSA likely mediates the relationship between KMS and BUTI (VAF = 72%), and BPP mediates the relationship between KMS and FP (VAF = 66%). The low VAF for the relationship between KMS and BPP (as mediated by BUTI) suggests that there is no mediation in this relationship. See Table 4 for details of these mediation analyses.

HYPOTHESIS TESTS
All hypotheses outlined in Figure 1 were supported (p < 0.05). See Table 5 for the details of those predictions.  Supported H2 Knowledge management strategy is positively associated with the benefits of IT use. Supported H3 Knowledge management strategy is positively associated with business process performance Supported H4 Knowledge management strategy is positively associated with firm performance Supported H5 IT strategic alignment is positively associated with benefits of IT use. Supported H6 The IT use are positively associated with business process performance Supported H7 Business process performance is positively associated with firm performance. Supported

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
In this study, we empirically examined a model with which we evaluated the business value of aligning IT with strategic activities. Specifically, we looked at antecedents (KMS and ITSA) and outcomes (BPP and FP) associated with the benefits of IT use in organizational settings. The study appears to be an excellent option for directing the adoption of strategy-oriented technology in business processes, because it helps to identify the benefits of IT use and how those benefits influence firm performance, and extends the knowledge of the literature of knowledge management strategy and information technology strategic alignment.
It has demonstrated that knowledge management strategy provides activities to create, share, capture and application strategic information concerning how a firm can leverage its capabilities and use its resources to enhance outcomes performance, and contribute to fill knowledge gaps mentioned in recent study (Song et al., 2019). Furthermore, it was showed that it is necessary to involve employees in the successful implementation of corporate.
In this vein, we demonstrated knowledge creation, sharing and capture between businesses is the key predictor of business value associated with the strategic alignment of IT, in line with previous studies (Al-Ammary, 2014; Shujahat et al., 2017).
This analyses further demonstrated that the adoption of IT was associated with processes that provide useful intelligence to an organization. This intelligence can help an organization to become more efficient, effective, or innovative. Hence, this study contributed to respond to the question mentioned by Tallon et al., 2019, and demonstrated how KMS reconciles the greater IT strategic alignment to enhance BPP agility and FP.
It was also showed that the benefits of IT use in the analytical domains assist managers in their decision making. We believe that executives have greater autonomy to make decisions related to productivity, and largely increase revenues through the generation of new products and services. This assumption is consistent with the notion that applications of IT are consolidated in Brazilian companies, in line with previous studies of decision support systems (Aydiner et al., 2019b; Davenport et al., 2010).

IMPLICATIONS FOR ORGANIZATIONS AND RESEARCHERS
In addition to the theoretical contributions they provide, our research findings also produce a significant amount of insight in terms of practical, managerial knowledge.
First, the result demonstrated that KMS is a key resource to enable ITSA to enhance outcomes performance. Second, the findings show that ITSA investment is significantly and positively related to BUTI. This result demonstrates the importance of IT use to perform activities related to the value chain and support decision making related to future strategic plans. This result helps us to understand the role that business processes plays in the value chain.
Arguably, one of the greatest contributions this research is a more comprehensive understanding of the antecedents and outcomes associated with the benefits of IT use. Specifically, we showed that the benefits of IT use generate added business value when IT is strategically aligned with several business activities. This alignment provides integration and harmonization between infrastructural, transactional, informational, and strategic IT assets. This finding is reiterated by the fact that ITSA exerted a strong effect (0.755) on the benefits of IT use, as well as the high level of variance explained (74.4%). Taken together, these results provide evidence for the importance of aligning an organization's IT use with its activities.
Third, and consistent with past research in this domain (see Grant, 2010;Melville et al., 2004, Tallon, 2008Tarhan et al., 2015), we found BPP to be significantly and positively associated with FP.
Finally, this study showed the utility of VAF to illustrate the mediating roles played by ITSA, BPP, and BUTI. The relationship between KMS and BUTI were partially mediated by ITSA. Similarly, the relationship between KMS and FP was partially mediated by BPP. Taken together, these mediator analyses help to show how business processes affect firm performance. In contrast to the mediated relationships described above, the relationship between KMS and BPP was not mediated by BUTI.
Ultimately, the results of this study show how organizations can leverage the strategic alignment of IT to create business value through the dissemination of knowledge management strategy. As such, this study can help organizations achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness in their implementation of IT to realize their strategies. As a result of this increased efficiency and effectiveness, they can achieve greater firm performance. Therefore, the current study justifies the adoption of IT alignment as appropriate and rational, even with limited resources available to facilitate such an adoption and contribute to IT-business value and strategy management literature.

STUDY LIMITATIONS
Although the study provided significant insight into the use of IT, it is important to acknowledge the study's limitations as well. However, future research could investigate the longitudinal design to an in-depth analysis of the mechanism that KM strategy acts on outcomes performance. Other future research could investigate this proposal model in other contexts. Additionally, a future study could consider the moderating influence of environmental turbulence, such as higher-level technological, dynamism, and heterogeneity, to provide insights into the practice of knowledge management strategy and information technology enhance outcomes performance.

APPENDIX A
Abbreviated questionnaire All items were presented in the firm of five-point Likert-type scales ranging from 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree).
Organizational knowledge of strategy Employees participate in... • (PART_1) teams that affect how company strategic objectives are attained.
• (PART_2) the generation of solutions to achieve common goals.
• (PART_3) teams to develop actions that promote effective results.
• (PART_4) various levels of decision making to analyze, plan, and implement actions and strategic initiatives.
The company engages in strategic communication… • (COMM_1) through collaborative meetings and discussions on strategic objectives. Employees comprehend… • (COMP_1) the main goal (common vision) to be achieved in the medium and long term.
• (COMP_4) the organization's philosophy and corporate belief system.
The company promotes continuous learning… • (COLE_1) through systematic processes that analyze organizational successes and failures.
• (COLE_2) to employees rethink the old and creating the new. • (COLE_3) by developing skills needed to create ideas that solve old problems and create new paradigms.
• (COLE_4) by analyzing stakeholder demands and rethinking, improving, and restructuring the company.
Strategic Alignment of Information Technology • (ITSA_1) The base foundation of IT infrastructure is aligned with the business' strategy to share IT services across multiple applications. • (ITSA_2) The IT transactions application portfolio is aligned with the business' strategy to execute business processes associated with the value chain. • (ITSA_3) The IT informational application portfolio is aligned with the business' strategy to provide information needed to optimize business processes. • (ITSA_4) The IT strategic application portfolio is aligned with the business' strategy to gain competitive advantages and achieve business goals. • (ITSA_G) The IT assets portfolio is aligned with the business' strategy.
Benefits of IT use The use of IT creates operational benefits… • (OPER_1) to execute operational activities geared towards achieving targets and business goals through broad IT infrastructure. • (OPER_2) to generate high-scale, mobile access to business information through public IT infrastructure. • (OPER_3) to enable the firm to reconfigure and adapt to new environmental requirements through broad IT infrastructure. • (OPER_4) to enable the firm to integrate and share data, information, and knowledge across different business process and sites. • (OPER_5) to execute and support of operational activities in the value chain.
• OPER_6) to reduce operational costs associated with the support and execution of operational activities in the value chain. • OPER_7) to improve the quality of products and services. • (OPER_8) to optimize operation capacity.
The use of IT creates analytical benefits… • (TACT_2) to improve the management of planning, execution, and control. • (TACT_3) to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of operational activities in the value chain. • (TACT_4) to improve management's analytical capabilities, allowing for better decision making. • (STRAT_2) to develop competitive advantages. • (STRAT_3) to satisfy customers' needs.
• (STRAT_4) to support strategy management Business process performance as measured by activities on the value chain is efficient and effective means of promoting… • (BP_1) business process innovation to create new products and services.
• (BP_2) business process operations.to transforming and delivering products and services • (BP_3) business process post-sale to create loyal customers Firm Performance: • (FP_1) The company reaches its goals for profitability to satisfied shareholders • (FP_2) The business is efficient in terms of spending (cost management, expenses and investments) to meets goals for productivity. • (FP_3) The company reaches its goals with respect to revenues. • (FP_4) Customers are satisfied with the value delivered by the company. • (FP_5) Customers remain loyal to the company.
• (FP_6) The market recognizes the company's image (brand) for the quality of the services and/or products it represents.

APPENDIX B
Cross-loadings of variables. First Latent Variable Items

SOURCES OF FUNDING
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.