Developing measures to assess the extent of sustainable competitive advantage provided by business process reengineering

Journal of the Academy of Business and Economics, April, 2003 by R. Srinivasan

3.4 Pilot Testing

A preliminary version of the questionnaire was pilot-tested with 30 respondents in nine organizations. Each respondent completed the questionnaire in the presence of the researcher and provided feedback regarding the wording of the questions, their understandability and overall organization of the instrument. The respondents faced no apparent difficulty in responding. However, some of the questions were found to be trying as responding to them involved revealing confidential information of the organization. On most of the other items respondents did not recommend any changes.

3.5 Sample Characteristics

Companies, which had embarked on a BPR program, qualified to be samples for this study. A list of 72 such organizations were drawn up. Most of these companies were in the large cities of India with a few sprinkled in small centers. It was decided that the data would be collected by personally administering the questionnaire in most of these companies and questionnaires would be mailed to companies that were not in large cities.

Thus for 60 organizations 142 responses were collected through personal interview and for the remaining 12 organizations 250 questionnaires were mailed and of them 39 responses which could be used for analysis were received. Hence 81 responses were collected from 723 organizations.

To ensure that the respondent sample was to biased toward specific types of firms based on location, size, and industry, an on-way ANOVA was performed on the complete set of data and it showed no significant differences. This enhances the generalizability of the results to a larger population. Table 2 summarizes the characteristics of the study sample.

3.6 Measurement Properties

Following (Bagozzi 1980), (Bagozzi & Phillips 1982), following measurement properties are considered minimally important for assessing the measures developed here:

* Internal consistency (i.e. reliability & unidimensionality),

* Convergent validity,

* Discriminant validity,

* Predictive validity.

The following paragraph briefly discusses these measurement properties--

Internal consistency refers to two related issue--unidimensionality and reliability. Assessing unidimensionality ensures that all the items measure the underlying theoretical construct in consideration, whilst reliability is an indication of the degree to which measures are free from random errors, and therefore yield consistent results. Convergent validity is an assessment of the consistency in measurements across multiple operationalizations, while discriminant validity is demonstrated when a measure does not correlate very highly with another measure from which it should differ. When the empirical data reflects certain predefined theoretical framework, the construct is inferred to fulfill the condition of Predictive Validity.

4. DATA ANALYSIS

4.1 Assessment of SCORE model

The measurement properties of SCORE model were first assessed by testing the hypothesized SCORE model using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) The choice here was between exploratory analysis (EFA) and (CFA). Since in research design the dimensions were defined a priori, CFA was chosen over EFA.