Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) adoption in South African SMEs

The advancement in technological development is now altering the conventional order in the diffusion of IT innovation from a top-down approach (organisation to employees) to a bottom-up approach (employees to organisation). This change is more notable in developed economies and has led to the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon which promises increased productivity for employees and their organisations. There have been several studies on the corporate adoption of BYOD but few have investigated the phenomenon from a small and medium enterprise (SME) perspective and from developing countries specifically. This study investigated the BYOD phenomenon in South African SMEs. The goal was to identify contextual factors influencing BYOD adoption with the purpose of understanding how these factors shaped and reshaped by SME actions. The Perceived EReadiness Model (PERM) was adopted to unearth contextual BYOD adoption factors, while the Structuration Theory was adopted as the theoretical lens from which the social construction of the BYOD phenomenon was understood. The study adopted an interpretive stance and was qualitative in nature. Data was collected from SMEs using semi-structured interviews, and analysed using a thematic analysis approach. The findings show that for BYOD to be adopted and institutionalized in an SME there needs to be organisational readiness in terms of awareness, management support, business resources, human resources, employees' pressure, formal governance, and technological readiness. Specifically, business resources, management support and technological readiness were perceived to be of the outmost importance to the success of BYOD. Environmental factors of market forces, support from industry, government readiness and the sociocultural factor are identified. Findings from the structuration analysis reports the presence of rules and resources (structures) which SMEs draw upon in their BYOD actions and interactions. It provides understanding on the guiding structures such as "no training" and "no formal governance" within which BYOD meanings are formed, and actions such as allowing employees to use their devices to access organisational resources without the fear of security breaches and data theft, are enacted. While it is true that the successive adoption of ICTs in organisation depends on the availability of a conducive formal policy, findings in the study show that SMEs used their business resources and management support as guiding structures of domination which were legitimized by internal informal verbal rules, lack of an institutional BYOD specific policy, minimal industry support; and the presences of social pressure

The Performativity of IS implementation outcomes: the case of an Enterprise System Implementation at Ìwádí University

IS implementation failure is high, yet uptake of these systems is still on the rise. This inconsistency might be because of the rational and narrative approach which characterizes how IS implementation success and failure are currently assessed and defined in research. This study challenges these dominant approaches (rational and narrative) which views outcomes as static and fixed by adopting a performative view. Hence the question: How are the realities of IS Implementation outcomes performed? This study adopted a case study methodology and used Actor Network Theory (ANT) in reconstructing the implementation story and producing knowledge claims. Findings indicate that the realities of IS implementation outcomes are performed by and within the groups in which the IS implementation is assessed. In this study, the IS implementation was assessed in two different groups and performed concurrent competing realities of IS implementation outcomes. This study elicits how factors such as expectation management, organizational politics, market recognition and the conditions of possibility played a key role in the intra-actions that enacted the realities of IS implementation outcomes. These factors were not pre-given rather they were locally produced within the IS implementation actor network