The need for speed: The decision to adopt service -oriented architecture.

摘要

There is a need for speed in organizations today. Whether it is for an increased responsiveness to the external environment to attain or maintain competitiveness, the ability to capitalize on potential new markets, or simply a means to minimize costs, decision speed is both desirable and increasingly necessary, for survival among organizations. Despite its importance, decision speed has not been explicitly examined in the literature. A major contribution of this dissertation is that it examines the key drivers of decision speed. Furthers the decision to adopt an innovation is an important stage of the innovation-decision process. This phase occurs when an organization engages in activities that lead to either the choice to adopt or reject an innovation (Rogers, 2003). There is ambiguity as to what occurs prior to the decision to adopt, however, and there are competing perspectives as to the drivers of these decisions. Despite this contention, innovation and information systems literature that examines the decision phase is sparse in comparison to the research that has focused on the latter stages of the innovation-decision process. This dissertation addresses this inequity by investigating the drivers of decision speed as well as other outcomes of the decision-making process. This approach is unique to information systems research and has several practical implications for business managers. A research model is proposed that advances hypotheses specific to the innovation examined in this dissertation, a service-oriented architecture. The result of large-scale quantitative study indicated support for the majority of the hypothesized relationships, with support for many of these relationships being statistically significant. An in-depth discussion for each of the hypothesized, relationships as well as for the surprising findings is then provided. Limitations of this dissertation as well as the opportunities for further research are identified followed by some concluding remarks.