While both the “strategy as positioning perspective” and the resource-based view of the
firm have served as theoretical foundations for research on the relationship between IT
and business value, the two research streams have evolved independently one from the
other. Authors have even described them as competing views (Duhan et al., 2001). In
strategy research, however, some authors have proposed that the two perspectives are
complementary rather than being opposed. To illustrate this complementarity, some
authors suggest that each perspective covers one component of the SWOT framework,
with the market driven perspective providing the analysis related to opportunities and
threats, and the resource-based view corresponding to the strengths and weaknesses
component of SWOT (Spanos and Lioukas,2001).