IT Adoption and Implementation on Pre-Implementation Phase: the Case of State Islamic University in Indonesia

Abstract

Adopting and implementing IT innovation in an organization is not a simple process, but it is a complex process (multi-dimensional process) and involves many factors that influence each other. Previous studies have shown that IT managers and decision makers have difficulty in taking appropriate actions that can be formulated in the concept of real implementation (actual implementation) to accelerate its progression to IT implementation. Past studies related IT innovation adoption and implementation were more dominated by discussions of evaluating and testing the model using the Traditional Innovation Adoption Framework, with main theories such as Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT). Although theory was dominant for decades in quantitative research approaches, this legacy of TAM and UTAUT is not without criticism. Among these criticisms, TAM is more focused on an individual's decision whether to reject an innovation and tends to ignore all aspects of group, social, and cultural decision making involved. This study uses the qualitative approaches that focus on descriptive explanation in the form of managerial intervention acts from IT executives and managers in the pre-implementation phase of the IT innovation adoption and implementation process. The framework used in this study is the Adoption and Implementation Innovation Framework from Irawan et al (2018), which consists of two phases, namely the pre-implementation phase (before the deployment of innovation) and the post-implementation phase (after the deployment of innovation). The pre-implementation phase describes the decisions and actions made by IT executives and managers at the start of the innovation implementation stage, which involves the primary adoption process and the mediating factors (managerial intervention). Meanwhile, the post-implementation phase (which is not included in the discussion of this study) describes employees' experience as adopters of IT innovation, including the Secondary Adoption Process, the Assimilation Process, and several mediating factors (post implementation intervention, subjective norms, and facilitating condition). The results shown that IT executives and managers in intervening (managerial intervention) greatly affect the successful an adoption and implementation of IT innovations at The Islamic based Higher Education Institutions in Indonesia (PTKIN).