There is reason for optimism in the hospitality & tourism industry. The 2010 Soccer World cup is expected to bring a flood of tourists to South Africa. The intense media interest will stimulate tourism. This will in turn translate into a cash injection for the hospitality industry. This bodes well for IT investment in this cash-constrained industry. For the IT supplier, it is useful to understand the factors that influence the IT usage patterns in the hospitality industry.

Monday, July 20, 2009

Stimulating IT Adoption

A great number of studies focusing on technology adoption concentrate on those factors that influence the likelihood of IT adoption.

While this is interesting from a vendor's perspective, it is equally relevant to understand those concrete activities that may be performed in order to stimulate IT adoption.

King (1994) itemises the actions that stimulate the adoption of IT by an organisation. Interestingly, King differentiates between actions that are performed by the consumer (in a demand-pull fashion) and those performed by the IS supplier (in a supply-push manner). Furthermore, consumer- and supplier- actions may be different depending on whether they are performed as a result of Influence (persuation) or Regulation (legislation).

According to King, the factors that influence IT adoption are:
- Knowledge building, which refers to activities that increase the pool of knowledge, e.g. funding of research.

- Knowledge deployment refers to the provision of information that allows competent use of the technology, e.g. training programmes.
- Subsidies refer to the funding of research and development programmes.
- Standardisation, which refers to the establishment of standards across organisations, so that innovations may more easily be adopted.
- Mobilisation, which refers to the effective coordination and alignment of the various parties, to ensure common purpose during IT adoption.
- Directives refer to coercive statements requiring the use of the innovation.

An IS vendor can perform the activities above to a greater or lesser extent to stimulate the adoption of IT. Examples of vendor activities that may be employed to stimulate the adoption of IT are:
- Creation and provision of training and education programmes (knowlege building and deployment)
- Ensuring compliance to laid-down industry standards (standardisation)


References

King JL, Gurbaxani V, Kraemer KL, McFarlan FW, Raman KS & Yap CS. (1994). Institutional Factors in Information Technology Innovation. Information Systems Research, 5(2):139-169.

2 comments:

  1. Focus is mainly on the TAM theory in explaining IT adoption in the hospitality industry. What about exploring the resource based view of the firm theory where research can be performed proving/disproving how increased IT capabilities in hospitality organsisations has a direct impact on a firm's performance. If hospitality organsiations became more aware of how IT capabilities could impact a firm's performance positively, then this should increase IT adoption.

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  2. Good suggestion, tx, but I changed the subject from IS Adoption to IS Use because I found adoption too restrictive.

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