Operationalizing IT Constructs Through Text-mining Corporate Regulatory Filings: A Literature Survey

Firm-level IT studies have always been facing data availability constraints, as strategic IT resources and activities of firms have at best limited visibility to outsider researchers. The lack of credible, granular, and precise IT data is arguably a major hindrance that slows down the conceptual development and empirical validation of firm-level IT theories. Corporate regulatory filings offer an opportunity to measure firms’ internal IT resources and activities. The textual format of these reports creates data processing challenges, though, but researchers nowadays are increasingly equipped with accessible and powerful text-mining tools, making it more feasible to retrieve targeted information and operationalize sophisticated constructs from these textual filings at a large scale. We launched a systematic literature survey to learn the current state of operationalizing firm-level IT constructs through text-mining firms’ corporate regulatory filings. The preliminary results show that the use of corporate regulatory filings as data is still rather sporadic among IS publications, although it might be gaining slight momentum.