Factors Affecting the Adoption of Information Technology

Whenever there is an introduction of a new IT product, the issue of adoption arises both in the academia and the industry. Academics want to know the reasons why people will or won’t adopt certain IT product and want to know the factors affecting the adoption behavior to predict the future behaviors of the users. Practitioners seek some ways to take advantage of the new business

opportunity, to investigate if there exists any possibility for themselves to cut down the cost or increase the profit, or to see if it worthy of considerable investments. Needless to say, without carefully considering all the major potential factors that may affect the adoption process might lead to a miserable failure.

Inspired by the TOE framework and other theory models mentioned in the previous section, we found that the TOE framework can fit in with our research well because what we are trying to

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research is the relationships among IaaS (technology), government agency (organization), and IaaS vendors (environment). Almost every factor that we can think of can be catogorized into one of them. As a result, we decide to classify the factors affecting the adoption of IaaS into three categories: technological factors, organizational factors, and environmental factors. Each of these three dimensions will be explained in detail respectively in following sections.

2.3.1 Technological Factors

The analyst Poon (2009) said that enterprise adoption of cloud computing is held back by myriad security issues, such as fears about data privacy and safety, and questions about regulatory compliance in a cloud environment. Just like we have said in previous sections, cloud computing technology is a double-edged sword. Although IaaS can benefit users in many ways, there are still many problems unsolved hence hampers the growth and the adoption of IaaS, for example, security of information, availability of the service, and so on. We define the “technological factors” as the factors that lie in IaaS technology itself that may influence users’ adoption decision.

In some well-known technology acceptance models, for example, TAM and TPB, technological factors such as “ease-of-use” or “usefulness” are frequently discussed. In the diffusion of

innovations theory proposed by Roger (1995), he posited that if an innovation offers advantages over the existing situation; is compatible with existing beliefs and needs; is easy to use; can be trialed; and its results are observable, then it is more likely to be rapidly adopted. Needless to say too much, when it comes to the adoption of a certain technology, it is indispensable to talk over the technology itself. Therefore, we know that technological factors are the must-have ingredients of our research framework.

2.3.2 Organizational Factors

In 1990s, many researchers focused their studies on interaction between organization and technology. They were interested in how to successfully implement an information system or how

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to take advantage of certain information technology in order to create a competitive advantage for the organization.

For example, according to the well-known Leavitt’s (1964) Diamond, everything in an organization is connected, and changing one piece can impact another. If someone wants to

introduce something into an organization, he or she must consider all of those interconnected pieces in the first place. Leavitt’s Diamond is based on the principle that an organization has four major components that are all interdependent: Structure, Tasks, Technology, and Individual & Roles.

Whether the users can benefit from a certain technology or not depends on how well their organizations fit into the mold, that is, the structure, tasks, and people of the organization must match the technology. Yap (1986) also suggests that organizational factors may determine the use of information technology or the use of information technology may influence the organization, or some combination of both.

Moreover, the report from the Yankee Group conducted in 2010 stated that the obstacles frequently mentioned by people who are involved in IaaS initiatives in addition to the security issues include “Migrating existing data and applications to the cloud could be costly and difficult,”

“Employee resistance,” “Lack of measureable business benefits,” and so on. These obstacles usually come from the inner part of the organization or at least have something to do with it. In view of the above, we can assert that there must be some organizational factors affecting the adoption of IaaS.

2.3.3 Environmental Factors

The organizations adopt technology in order to adapt to the environment and face the challenge from the environment. According to Laudon and Laudon (2005), the interaction between

information technology and organizations is complex and is influenced by many mediating factors.

One of the mediating factors is its surrounding environment. Organizations must respond to

legislative and other requirements imposed by government, as well as the actions of customers and competitors. Therefore, it seems reasonable to consider environmental factors in the context of the

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IT adoption of organizations. For example, Tan, Nah, Iacovou, and Kim (2003) incorporate environmental factors that might influence the adoption of e-marketplaces by small organizations into their research model and think that environment factors play a significant role in adoption decisions. Gemino, Mackay, and Reich (2006) also suggested that researchers can expand their research about the executive’s decisions about website adoption for explanatory power by including variables from different contexts, including environmental and organizational characteristics.

Drawing on the above literatures, we include environmental factors in our research framework as well.

On the other hand, when talking about the important issues of information technology that impact organizations significantly in recent years, it is certain that Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system will be mentioned. IaaS has a lot in common with ERP. For example, ERP sets the stage for effective supply chain management, customer relationship management, and electronic commerce, while IaaS provides the foundation for PaaS and SaaS. Both technologies are aiming at cutting cost and improving efficiency for the adopter organizations. ERP systems consolidate all business operations into a uniform and enterprise-wide system environment; IaaS has the potential to amalgamate the entire IT infrastructure by centralizing all the computing, storage, and

networking facilities. Moreover, the implementation projects of both technologies are long-term, large-scale, and high-risk projects that involve complicated technology, may influence all the processes of the adopter organization, and usually cost a huge amount of money. Therefore, we think that ERP might be a good analogy for IaaS. Since there are still not many researchers studying the successful factors for the adoption of IaaS, we would like to borrow the research findings from the study of ERP.

Among the critical success factors of ERP reported in many researches, some of them are vendor’s experience, vendor’s support, and use of consultants. Some practitioners agree that these factors are as much important as ERP software itself for a successful implementation. Based on this analogy, we can infer that IaaS may not be successful without vendor’s support. Thus, we think that

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vendors should also play one of the important roles in environmental context in our research framework.