Information technology acceptance: evolving with the changes in the network environment

Abstract

The existing models of information technology (IT) acceptance were developed with the concept of the static individual computing environment in mind. As such, in today's rapidly changing IT environment, they do not serve as adequate indicators of an individual's IT usage behavior. The author addresses this problem by first carefully observing the changing needs of a user, and discussing network (distributed computing) trends of the IT environment. He enhances the existing models of IT by introducing several factors, including internal personal belief factors, external social belief factors, and other relevant determinants based on network externality and complementarity that influence an individual to use IT. He begins with the review of what other researchers have done on the topics of the adoption and diffusion of IT. He does this by reexamining and recognizing the theoretical contributions and empirical findings of various researchers. He discusses the key determinants of IT use and diffusion in a distributed network computing environment. He integrates the factors into his model by carefully evaluating their applicability. Lastly, he discusses the contribution of the model for future empirical research in the field. In all, he proposes a more enriched model of IT acceptance by combining the behavioral models of IT acceptance and the models of IT diffusion from various other disciplines (i.e., marketing, economics, etc).