Keywords

IT knowledge, non-IT professionals, adoption, continuance, econometric analysis, healthcare, pharma, CRM, SaaS, cloud computing, self-assessment

Abstract

For organizations to achieve the benefits of new IT systems their users must adopt and then actually use these new systems. Recent models help to articulate the potentially different explanations for why some users will adopt and then continue using new technologies, but these models have not explicitly incorporated IT-knowledge. This is particularly important in contexts where the user base may be non-IT professionals—i.e. the users may vary substantially in their basic IT-knowledge. We draw upon psychology to argue that in situations where there is wide variance in actual IT-knowledge there will often exist U relationship between actual and self-perceived IT-knowledge such that the least knowledgeable believe themselves to be highly knowledgeable. We then draw upon individual level adoption theories to argue that users with high self-perceived IT-knowledge will be more likely to adopt new technologies and do so faster. We also draw upon individual level continuance theories to argue that users with low actual IT-knowledge will be more likely to discontinue using new technologies and do so faster. We test our expectations using a proprietary data set of 225 sales professionals in a large Indian pharmaceutical company that is testing a new CRM system. We find strong support for our hypotheses.

Original Publication Citation

Aggarwal, R., Kryscynski, D., Midha, V., & Singh, H. 2015. Early to Adopt and Early to Discontinue: the impact of self-perceived and actual IT-knowledge on technology use behaviors of end users. Information Systems Research. 26 (1): 127-144.

Document Type

Peer-Reviewed Article

Publication Date

2015

Permanent URL

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/3931

Publisher

INFORMS

Language

English

College

Marriott School of Management

Department

Information Systems

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