Consumer Information Technology Research Articles

How Information Technology (IT) Is Shaping Consumer Behavior in the Digital Age: A Systematic Review and Future Research Directions

The success of modern businesses hinges on their capability to recognize and explore emerging patterns in consumer behavior within the context of information technology (IT). While the study of consumer behavior has made notable progress, there remains a need to study the convergence between IT and consumer behavior to discover new prospects and insights that can improve business performance. Therefore, conducting a thorough study to evaluate the current state of research in this area is imperative. This endeavor can accumulate and map current research, extending knowledge and good practices for businesses and stakeholders. This study studied the intersection of IT and consumer behavior using the systematic literature review (SLR) approach and the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) 2020 guidelines. The primary objective was to review the comprehensiveness of systematic review reports and meta-analysis studies in journals indexed with the SSCI and SCIE categories of the Web of Science. After applying the PRISMA approach, a sample of 40 eligible articles was finalized for further review. It identified four critical themes related to research: technological diffusion, disruptive consumer behavior, IT and consumer behavior, and the impact of IT on consumer behavior. The study’s results deliver practical implications for businesses and stakeholders and contribute to progressing knowledge in this domain.

Consumer information technology use in the post-pandemic workplace: a post-acceptance adaptation perspective

PurposePersonally owned mobile information and communication technologies (MICT) have been widely and routinely used for work purposes in the post-pandemic workplace. Drawing on adaptive structuration theory for individuals (ASTI), this study investigates the antecedents (i.e. characteristics of MICT) and outcomes (i.e. employee affective and cognitive well-being) of routine MICT use in the remote work context.Design/methodology/approachThe research model was empirically tested via a survey of 430 working professionals who use personal MICT for work purposes in the remote work context.FindingsResults show that the routine MICT use increases employee affective well-being (i.e. job satisfaction) and mitigates cognitive well-being (i.e. technology overload). The mediation effects of routine MICT use on the relationships between its characteristics (autonomy and timeliness) and employee well-being (i.e. job satisfaction and technology overload) were also found.Originality/valueExisting research on remote work has widely focused on employee productivity and performance, while attention has rarely been paid to the effects of the technology-driven “new normal” on employee well-being. Grounded in ASTI, this study identifies three MICT characteristics as sources of user adaptive structuration, which impact employees' routine MICT use behavior and further influence employee affective and cognitive well-being. This research can help understand employees' personal MICT use adaptive behavior and improve their well-being.

Exploring the Discursive Emphasis on Patients and Coaches Who Participated in Technology-Assisted Diabetes Self-management Education: Clinical Implementation Study of Health360x

BackgroundA critical unmet need for underserved patients with diabetes is regular access to sufficient support for diabetes self-management. Although advances in digital technologies have made way for eHealth applications that provide a scalable path for tailored interventions for self-management of chronic conditions, health and digital literacy has remained an obstacle to leveraging these technologies for effective diabetes self-management education. Studies have shown that the availability of coaches helps to maintain engagement in internet-based studies and improves self-efficacy for behavior change. However, little is known about the substances involved in these interactions.ObjectiveThis study aims to compare the content of conversations between patient–coach pairs that achieved their self-management goals and those that did not. The context is a clinical implementation study of diabetes self-management behavior change using Health360x within the practices of the Morehouse Choice Accountable Care Organization in the Atlanta metro area. Health360x is a coach-assisted consumer health information technology designed to support self-management skills acquisition and behavior among underserved, high-risk patients with diabetes.MethodsWe provide a novel analysis of the discursive emphasis on patients and coaches. We examined transcripts of visits using a structural topic model to estimate topic content and prevalence as a function of patient and coach characteristics. We compared topics between patient–coach pairs that achieved diabetes-related self-management goals and those who did not. We also estimated a regression in which utterances are the units, the dependent variable is the proportion of an utterance that is about a given topic, and the independent variables are speaker types and explored other themes.ResultsTranscripts from 50 patients who were recruited and consented, starting in February 2015, were analyzed. A total of 44 topics were estimated for patient–coach pairs that achieved their intended health goals and 50 topics for those who did not. Analysis of the structural topic model results indicated that coaches in patient–coach pairs that were able to achieve self-management goals provided more contextual feedback and probed into patients’ experience with technology and trust in consumer information technologies. We also found that discussions around problem areas and stress, support (βCoach=.015; P<.001), initial visits (βCoach=.02; P<.001), problems with technology (βCoach=.01; P<.001), health eating goals (βCoach=.01; P=.04), diabetes knowledge (βCoach=.02; P<.001), managing blood sugar (βCoach=.03; P<.001), and using Health360x (βCoach=.003; P=.03) were dominated by coaches.ConclusionsCoach-facilitated, technology-based diabetes self-management education can help underserved patients with diabetes. Our use of topic modeling in this application sheds light on the actual dynamics in conversations between patients and coaches. Knowledge of the key elements for successful coach–patient interactions based on the analysis of transcripts could be applied to understanding everyday patient–provider encounters, given the recent paradigm shift around the use of telehealth.

Behavioral Interventions Using Consumer Information Technology as Tools to Advance Health Equity.

The digital divide related to consumer information technologies (CITs) has diminished, thus increasing the potential to use CITs to overcome barriers of access to health interventions as well as to deliver interventions situated in the context of daily lives. However, the evidence base regarding the use and impact of CIT-enabled interventions in health disparity populations lags behind that for the general population. Literature and case examples are summarized to demonstrate the use of mHealth, telehealth, and social media as behavioral intervention platforms in health disparity populations, identify challenges to achieving their use, describe strategies for overcoming the challenges, and recommend future directions. The evidence base is emerging. However, challenges in design, implementation, and evaluation must be addressed for the promise to be fulfilled. Future directions include (1) improved design methods, (2) enhanced research reporting, (3) advancement of multilevel interventions, (4) rigorous evaluation, (5) efforts to address privacy concerns, and (6) inclusive design and implementation decisions.

C3-PRO: Connecting ResearchKit to the Health System Using i2b2 and FHIR.

A renewed interest by consumer information technology giants in the healthcare domain is focused on transforming smartphones into personal health data storage devices. With the introduction of the open source ResearchKit, Apple provides a framework for researchers to inform and consent research subjects, and to readily collect personal health data and patient reported outcomes (PRO) from distributed populations. However, being research backend agnostic, ResearchKit does not provide data transmission facilities, leaving research apps disconnected from the health system. Personal health data and PROs are of the most value when presented in context along with health system data. Our aim was to build a toolchain that allows easy and secure integration of personal health and PRO data into an open source platform widely adopted across 140 academic medical centers. We present C3-PRO: the Consent, Contact, and Community framework for Patient Reported Outcomes. This open source toolchain connects, in a standards-compliant fashion, any ResearchKit app to the widely-used clinical research infrastructure Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2). C3-PRO leverages the emerging health data standard Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR).

Digital services for consumers

This issue includes four papers that tackle important issues in the context of our special issue “Digital Services for Consumers”. As we highlighted in our call for papers, mobile computing, high speed communication, internet of things, and a plethora of services available through several devices change the way we live. This is a huge potential but also a challenge for consumers as well as enterprises. We observe that this digitization of our everyday life has already led to a change in the preferences of the customers and this change will continue (Dellarocas 2013; Rechert et al. 2014; Reichhart et al. 2013). Successful services are often personalized, context adaptive, real-time, available anywhere, connected, and fun to use. The digital user has become powerful, since the competitor is just one click away. Thus, only perceivable usefulness, ease of use, and individual user-centricity of the service will bind the user to an offering. These innovative services have emerged first in the consumer world, making consumer markets for the first time the pacemakers of IT transformation. Furthermore, these consumer IT innovations change user expectations fundamentally, not only with respect to IT services, but to products and services in general. Everything as a service when, how, and where each user wants it – becomes a paradigm for many successful new offerings. In this new Digital World, companies have much more problems understanding and anticipating customer demands since user behavior and preferences have changed dramatically. Most of the traditional approaches for designing and delivering products and services in this digital world seem outdated and incapable to address this fast changing environment of digital users (Leimeister et al. 2014). Consequently, we need to answer a vast amount of new questions: What services are useful, best adapted to each and every user?Which are fun to use? How to handle complexity of different offerings? What types of services havewhich benefit, when, how, and for whom? What services around product offerings are most beneficial for which purpose?Which services work best for digital natives and digital immigrants? What are underlying mechanisms for explaining successful design, use, and effects of digital services for consumers? Service innovations, new ways of service creation, orchestration, and consumption, using and creating vast amounts of openly available or user-generated data, offer great potential for improving everyday life of large parts of our society. Examples range from healthcare (with e.g., offerings such as patientslikeme.com) to new business models and ways of value creation and value capturing become critical, as a big opportunity, but also as a challenge for enterprises and other organizations. Electronic web services emerge for all areas of life, e.g., entertainment, communication, shopping, household, health, mobility, work, and finance. These questions and opportunities are the outcomes of a transformation of our society towards a digital society. Historically, the advent of information technology (IT) in businesses led to a transformation from the industrial society into the information society, putting much emphasis on scalability of businesses through automization and standardization. Process orientation was the paradigm for efficiency gains, especially in back office environments. Today, the increasing ubiquity of IT and its penetration of our everyday life transforms the information society into the digital society, J. M. Leimeister (*) Resarch Center for IS Design (ITeG), Chair for Information Systems, University of Kassel, Pfannkuchstrasse 1, 34121 Kassel, Germany e-mail: JanMarco.Leimeister@unisg.ch

Toward Everyone's IT: A Study of Consumerization at GlobalBankCorp

The adoption and use of consumer information technology (IT) solutions in the enterprise is on the rise. The phenomenon, often referred to as consumerization, has a significant potential to reshape relationships to IT across different organizational contexts and levels. Yet, scholarly research examining topics related to consumerization, such as the use of mobile email devices by the workforce, so far has been rather mute on the deeper organizational shifts that are occurring as a result of consumerization. Our study of consumerization at GlobalBankCorp finds that business practitioners’ use of IT in organizational context is undergoing a significant change. To deepen our understanding of this change we introduce the concept of “everyone’s IT.” Developed through grounded theorizing, the concept synthesizes three practices enacted by business practitioners in their interactions with IT, namely (1) drawing upon unbounded consumer IT resources; (2) developing a consumer IT mindset; and (3) leveraging consumer IT’s potential for value creation. We define and elaborate the three practices by zooming in onto two particular case contexts within GlobalBankCorp. In combination, the two contexts explain the observed shift and suggest that this shift presents significant challenges to the well established assumptions about the role and boundaries of the IT function in organizations. We expect that our work will contribute to broadening the scholarly conversation about consumerization from that focused solely on the adoption and use of consumer IT by employees to a more comprehensive view capturing how organizations embrace consumerization to develop new products and services, re-define their business model, and re-think their relationship to IT.

Everyday appropriations of information technology: A study of creative uses of digital cameras

Repurposive appropriation is a creative everyday act in which a user invents a novel use for information technology (IT) and adopts it. This study is the first to address its prevalence and predictability in the consumer IT context. In all, 2,379 respondents filled in an online questionnaire on creative uses of digital cameras, such as using them as scanners, periscopes, and storage media. The data reveal that such creative uses are adopted by about half of the users, on average, across different demographic backgrounds. Discovery of a creative use on one's own is slightly more common than is learning it from others. Most users discover the creative uses either completely on their own or wholly through learning from others. Our regression model explains 34% of the variance in adoption of invented uses, with technology cognizance orientation, gender, exploration orientation, use frequency, and use tenure as the strongest predictors. These findings have implications for both design and marketing.