A STUDY ON THE ASSIMILATION OF DIGITAL CONTENT IDENTIFIER IN DIGITAL CONTENT FIRMS

Abstract

Recently, in view of the development of the digital content industry, it is widely recognized that digital content identifier is important for content creators, content providers, content distributors and users. However, the current identifier URL has some limitations. Firstly, it can't identify content persistently because it ties digital contents to their current network locations and file paths. Secondly, URL doesn't provide metadata of digital content, which would cause the problems of intellectual property rights. To solve these limitations, many identifiers based on URN such as DOI, CID appeared. In South Korea, the universal content identifier (UCI) was developed by government as a digital content identifier national standard in 2003. As a new information technology, UCI has been applied to digital content industry for only 5 years. In the last 5 years, there were not so many researches on UCI except some case studies. It is recognized that the IT investment is not proportional to the IT investment effect. It means that even with significant investment on IT, firms often fail to realize the expected payoffs. Thus, IT assimilation is regarded as an important issue for firms to leverage the potential of information technologies in their business activities and strategies. There are 13 digital content firms that assimilated UCI by far. This study selects UCI cases as research object and tests the relations between the independent variables and dependent variable presented in conceptual model. It finds that the level of external influences is a critical factor which affects the digital content identifier assimilation effect. It also finds that neither the level of external influences nor the digital content identifier assimilation effects have differences between the private and public firms except one factor: the cost reduction in digital content management.