Technology Adoption: Boosters and Barriers

Abstract

While the previous chapter elaborated the rationale for organizations to implement information systems, this chapter explores the reasons for success, trouble, and failure in organizational implementation. These reasons are many and interdependent. They include reasons about the technology as such, but they are mostly about the fit between the system and organization. Different groups of people in the organization will perceive this fit differently. They may, for example, assign primacy to different aspects of the organizational change pursued with the implementation and, as a result, disagree about whether the change is desirable. Such disagreements can lead some groups to embrace the system, others to adopt it hesitantly, and still others to work around it.