A stakeholder approach to electronic commerce diffusion

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The evolution of electronic commerce as a global technological innovation raised a number of issues related to its adoption. Specifically, although electronic commerce use by companies has been associated with significant opportunities for growth, it has not been adopted in full. Small and Medium Size Enterprises (SMEs) in particular seem to hesitate to invest in electronic commerce technologies for reasons related to lack of awareness and concerns about security, human resources and cost. This phenomenon points to a need for effective electronic commerce diffusion strategies by policy makers in various levels of decision-making. This research recognises the importance of electronic commerce and realises the difficulties involved in its effective adoption. For that reason it offers an in-depth study of the electronic commerce diffusion process by examining the roles, activities and relationships of the entities involved in this process. Theories that support the research effort are innovation diffusion and stakeholder theories, which are synthesised in order to develop a framework that illustrates how the gaps in the literature can be bridged and how it can be used as an instrument to guide empirical work in the field of electronic commerce diffusion. The empirical contexts of the research are two projects on electronic commerce diffusion, which are analysed using an interpretive and qualitative research approach. The study concludes with specific implications for stakeholders involved in the provision of information and advice about electronic commerce and related consequences for diffusion receivers. The findings of this research can be useful for all stakeholders in the field, as they can get a better understanding of their own position as well as that of other actors in the context. Additionally, researchers in similar areas can find this work useful as a way to approach the study of the diffusion.Funding was obtained from Brunel University and the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC

Using IT Mindfulness to Mitigate the Negative Consequences of Technostress

Research in the IS field has been focusing on investigating the adverse effects of ICT usage such as technostress. Nevertheless, few studies have investigated mechanisms for the alleviation of this phenomenon. This study contributes to the technostress literature by adopting a mindfulness perspective that has not been investigated before. In this paper, we aim to explore the role of IT mindfulness as a buffer to technostress stressors as well as a mechanism that can mitigate the negative consequences arising from extended ICT usage within organizational settings. By following a survey based approach and exploring a sample of 440 working individuals, our SEM analysis revealed that IT mindfulness constitutes a potential further mechanism that can effectively reduce technostress conditions, enhance user satisfaction while utilizing ICT’s for work tasks and improve task performance. Further research is proposed into expanding the proposed model, exploring the influence of IT mindfulness on additional organizational outcomes. Keywords IT Mindfulness, Technostress, stressors, ICT, organization

A Framework of Broadband Adoption & Diffusion (BA&D): Understanding Factors Relevant to Residential Consumers and Small & Medium Enterprises

The aim of this paper is to outline various factors reported in the adoption of broadband technologies at consumer as well as company level. These factors are presented here after the collection and analysis of papers examining various perspectives, application levels and geographical locations. In this paper we organize the identified factors in a meaningful manner in order to propose a framework of broadband adoption and diffusion. The proposed framework includes three levels of factors – macro factors, residential consumers’ micro factors and SMEs level micro factors. These three levels of factors are relevant at different levels of development, deployment and diffusion of broadband which are apparent in various developed and developing countries. The paper concludes by suggesting that the proposed framework can be used by future studies as a way to study IT adoption and diffusion phenomena in various application and geographical contexts

The providers ’ perspective in IP telephony diffusion: Insights from the Danish market

The IP telephony market has been subject to publicity due to the recent increase of users worldwide. Although not a new technology, given that IP telephony was developed in the mid-nineties, it lately became popular as a lower-priced alternative to fixed telephony through the availability of high bandwidth networks. While prior studies focused on technical aspects such as quality of service and regulatory issues, little attention has been paid to the vendors’ perspective in the IP-telephony market. In this paper we argue that by using the innovation diffusion theory to examine the supply rather than the demand side of IP telephony, we can get a better understanding of existing market dynamics and future trends. We draw our conclusions based on a study of the IP-telephony market in Denmark where we interviewed the major providers. Our results indicate that the main concern for vendors is task complexity, which along with existing difficulties in task and technology compatibility seem to drive a shift of their interests from offering basic telephone call services to more advanced ones, such as video telephony. We believe that our research can be useful for the study of technology diffusion in general and IP-telephony in particular

Is there a viable future for residential IP-Telephony users? Exploring providers’ and end-users’ perspectives

The emergence of IP telephony as a lower-priced alternative to traditional phone services has raised questions of what users want and what vendors have to offer. In this article we investigate the views of both users and vendors on critical issues for IP telephony diffusion based on diffusion of innovation theory. We draw our conclusions from the study of a dynamic IP-telephony market where we interviewed IP telephony providers and surveyed residential users. Our results indicate that vendors’ main concern is users’ lack of technical skills, while users are comfortable with technical complexity, and are interested in price reductions