A User Commitment Approach to Information Systems Infusion

Many organizations have huge investments on information systems (IS) but are unable to achieve the maximum benefits expected. The IS infusion stage refers to the state of using IS to its full potential. IS infusion is a form of organizational citizenship behavior because full utilization of IS requires extra-role behaviors (i.e., IS use beyond the mandated usage) beyond intra-role behaviors (i.e., mandated IS usage). As commitment is a key driver of organizational citizenship behavior, IS infusion requires the user’s commitment to IS usage. This study investigates the development of user commitment from the socio-technical system design perspective and the effect of user commitment on IS infusion. We identified five constructs from the socio-technical system design (job fit, task competence, technology competence, self-determination with technology, and self-determination with task). A survey of 236 enterprise system users showed that user commitment has a positive effect on IS infusion. User commitment, in turn, is influenced by job fit, technology competence, and self-determination with task. This study contributes to IS infusion research by introducing the development of user commitment from the socio-technical system design perspective. Managers can promote user commitment in order to reach the infusion stage of fully utilizing information systems

Achieving IT diffusion within the fragments: an IT culture perspective

Many organizations still fail to make a return from the huge investments they make in implementing complex Information Technology (IT). This is usually due to cultural forces that inhibit the level of usage required to facilitate IT Diffusion. An emerging stream of research highlights the IT culture perspective, a perspective vital for understanding individuals’ social practices when they interact with IT. This paper adopted a case study approach to explore how the IT culture perspective may explain how organizational diffusion of an IT may happen despite opposing cultural forces causing a stalemate to the diffusion process. This study identified three IT culture archetypes - embracing, rejecting and confused, depicting a fragmented IT culture during the adaption, acceptance and routinization stages of diffusion of an IT. This study highlights how a salient element of a fragmented IT culture-embracing IT culture archetype could explain how diffusion of an IT happened despite the manifestations of negative IT culture archetypes - ‘confused’ and ‘rejecting’ during the diffusion process

Investigating Information Systems Infusion and the Moderating Role of Habit: A User Empowerment Perspective

Organizations have made significant investments in information systems (IS) implementation. However, more than half of these IS implementations have reported failures due to underutilization. Although it is known that IS infusion is required for realizing expected returns on investments, most IS research has focused on initial adoption and continuance with only a handful examined infusion. These few IS infusion studies have produced inconclusive results as they have employed models and factors that are used for adoption and continued use. Compare to adoption and continuance, IS infusion requires authentic motivation of users. Thus, this study examines IS infusion using user empowerment as the authentic motivation based on the psychological empowerment theory which can explain employee’s behavior beyond management prescription. Results show that the four user empowerment dimensions have significant effects on the three IS infusion subtypes. Further, results show that habit attenuates the importance of user competence for extended use and integrative use but reinforces the importance of usage meaning for extended use and user self-determination for integrative use. This study advances our theoretical understanding of IS infusion and offers suggestions to organizations in achieving IS infusion

User IT Adaptation Behaviors: What Have We Learned and Why Does it Matter?

We provide a review of the IT adaptation behaviors within IS research, addressing questions such as: what have we learned about this multifaceted phenomenon? who are contributors to the debate? and why does this topic matter? The article is intended to be insightful to faculty and students considering research on this emerging, intriguing yet complex topic of IT-related user adaptive behaviors. It is equally useful to instructors preparing lectures, managers and practitioners seeking to understand and assess the ‘state-of-the-play’ as well as those who want to think about strategic management and investments in human capital. In this article we focus on IT-related user adaptation behaviors, reviewing past studies and proposing integrating views. It is both informative and provocative. Challenges to the value of IT adaptation behaviors research, divergent views, and new perspectives on adaptive responses are presented. This article will spark helpful conversation on this topic

A meta-analysis of relationships between organizational characteristics and IT innovation adoption in organizations

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Information & Management. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2012 Elsevier B.V.Adoption of IT in organizations is influenced by a wide range of factors in technology, organization, environment, and individuals. Researchers have identified several factors that either facilitate or hinder innovation adoption. Studies have produced inconsistent and contradictory outcomes. We performed a meta-analysis of ten organizational factors to determine their relative impact and strength. We aggregated their findings to determine the magnitude and direction of the relationship between organizational factors and IT innovation adoption. We found organizational readiness to be the most significant attribute and also found a moderately significant relationship between IT adoption and IS department size. Our study found weak significance of IS infrastructure, top management support, IT expertise, resources, and organizational size on IT adoption of technology while formalization, centralization, and product champion were found to be insignificant attributes. We also examined stage of innovation, type of innovation, type of organization, and size of organization as moderator conditions affecting the relationship between the organizational variables and IT adoption

Examining Information Systems Infusion over the Routinization

Information systems (IS) infusion becomes important from the management perspective because organizations can leverage IS investment only at the IS infusion stage. The model for the stages of IS implementation explains that IS infusion can be achieved through IS routinization. This study examined how to achieve IS infusion through routinization based on application of the psychological empowerment theory and the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT), respectively. This study adds value to the IS literature by explaining how IS routinization leads to IS infusion and how their antecedents are different and related across the two stages. This study also provides guidance on how organizations can promote IS infusion beyond IS routinization, which then helps organizations leverage their IS investments

Infusing with ERP Systems: A Longitudinal Investigation of the Impact of Control and Empowerment

Organizations have made significant investments in ERP systems with the strategic expectation that employees will utilize this technology to enhance organizational performance. However, research indicates that ERP systems are under-utilized. In order to entangle the challenge of under-utilization, this paper addresses the impact of control and empowerment on infusion – the deep and comprehensive usage of an information system. We apply a longitudinal design with two measurements to research whether the level of infusion of ERP users changes over time, and if so to what extent. Moreover we hypothesize that ‘soft’ characteristics like the organizational position, organization commitment and trust influence the relation between control, empowerment and the level of infusion of the ERP user. A survey was conducted in a large public organization which has been using an ERP system for several years. A sample of 178 matched pairs (For T1 and T2) of ERP system users and their supervisors has been collected. In this research in progress we present the theoretical mechanisms and methodological framework we employed for the data collection

A transition process from information systems acceptance to infusion behaviour in online brand communities: A socialization process perspective

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Social media such as Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and online communities plays an important role for knowledge production and diffusion as well as discussions among people. Among social media, online brand communities (OBCs) have recently received attention from both academics and practitioners due to the practical benefits of OBCs for consumers and companies. For consumers, knowledge sharing and its collective activities help them to make purchase decisions and to protect themselves against firms’ monopoly and oligopoly or collusion and anticompetitive actions. For companies, new ideas and feedback on brand products created by OBC members are useful input to develop new products and enhance existing product lines. Therefore, active content generation by community members is one of the critical success factors of OBCs. However, many scholars argue that only a few members who are more devoted to a community are tending to engage in OBC activities and many community members tend to remain in the periphery (sometimes called ‘lurkers') of the community by using OBCs merely for gathering information without any contributions. Therefore, it is important to make members in the periphery of the community transit to the core to increase members’ intentions and ‘devoted members’ to produce more valuable benefits for both consumers and firms. In spite of its importance, the literature is lacking in efforts to explain how and when community members in the periphery transit to the core of the community in a long-term perspective. This study aims to reveal how and why OBC members transit from the periphery to the core of the community and how to increase their intention to use OBC from a long-term perspective. OBC use behaviour is classified into, largely, two categories according to the purposes of an OBC: behaviour with a brand product consumption purpose; and behaviour with a social relationship building purpose. This study classifies OBC members as three clusters by social identity theory: tourists, minglers, and devoted members (devotees and insiders). The devoted members have valuable consumption knowledge of brand and strong social bonds in the OBC and the OBC members become a devoted member by accumulated brand knowledge and experiences through long-term OBC use. Therefore, from a socialisation aspect, this study adopts organisational socialisation theory as the theoretical lens to explain how and why the members evolve from novice members as tourist to devoted members in OBC contexts. Socialisation theories argue that there are usually three sequential stages for a member to gain full membership in a community: pre-entry, accommodation, and affiliation. In addition, this study adopts IS implementation theory to understand OBC user behaviours from an IS use behaviour perspective: acceptance in the pre-entry stage and routinisation in the accommodation stage and infusion in the affiliation stage. By reviewing socialisation theory and IS implementation theory, this study finds four significant motivations, those of information quality, trust, sense of belonging, and brand loyalty for intention of OBC use from the acceptance (pre-entry) to infusion (affiliation) stages. To integrate the socialisation perspective with the IS use perspective, this study adopts a technology acceptance model (TAM) as a theoretical framework to link to motivators in different OBC use behaviour from the acceptance to infusion stages. As a result, this study proposes a conceptual framework to explain the OBC members’ transition process from acceptance (pre-entry) to infusion (affiliation). The aim of this study is to predict and explain the transition of motivators for OBC use from pre-entry to affiliation and how to improve members’ intention of OBC use from a long-term perspective ultimately to foster ‘devoted members’. This study adopts an online survey targeting 518 participants who belong to 17 OBCs in South Korea and the conceptual framework is validated. The results show that all factors (i.e. information quality, trust, sense of belonging, brand loyalty) are significant determinants to increase intention to use OBCs and the factors have a causal relationship with each other to form a transition process from the acceptance (pre-entry) to infusion (affiliation) stages. This study also reveals that brand loyalty has a significant role to explain the transition process and directly influence user intention to use OBCs. The sense of belonging also directly affects members’ intention to use OBCs but has less impact than brand loyalty. In addition, the results indicate that TAM is an appropriate model to predict user behaviours in a long-term perspective to explain the change of OBC use behaviour from the acceptance to infusion stage and confirms that perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use have significant impact on the intention to use OBCs as in other IS studies. Understanding the transition process within OBCs has theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, it will extend our understanding of how IS end users transit from acceptance behaviour to continued use and extended use of information systems in virtual community contexts. For managers, this study will provide them with insight on how to retain potential consumers in OBCs and facilitate their activities to gain consumer feedback on existing and new products

FROM ACCEPTANCE TO OUTCOME: TOWARDS AN INTEGRATIVE FRAMEWORK FOR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION

Decades of research on information technology (IT) adoption have resulted in a large number of different models and theories. While the number of theoretical models has significantly increased our knowledge on IT adoption, we lack an integrative view of the different stages of the adoption process. In this paper, we review the primary theories from both the acceptance and post-acceptance stage of IT adoption. In addition, we synthesize the different theories and their constructs in a reference framework for IT adoption. We conceptualize individual IT adoption as a dynamic process, in which use patterns, beliefs, and individual motivations change over time. Our framework provides an end-to-end view of IT adoption, spanning the adoption process from acceptance antecedents to outcomes. Eventually, we suggest opportunities for future research based on the different stages of our framework. We believe that our framework will be helpful to develop more complete and actionable theories, and to provide clarity on the concepts and stages related to IT adoption