Absorptive Capacity and Intention to Adopt It A Mediation Model of it Competence of Cloud Computing in Small and Medium Enterprises

Abstract

While technology adoption remains a widely studied area in IS Research, decisions to adopt innovative and complex new technologies remain a challenge for organizations, and there is a need to find answers to important questions in this area of research. Prior research demonstrates that absorptive capacity fosters knowledge creation in an organization through the processes of acquisition, assimilation, transformation, and exploitation of valuable external knowledge. A careful review of the popular information technology adoption models reveals the quintessential role being played by knowledge about the focal technology in such IT adoption decisions by organizations. While studies on IT-IS strategic alignment highlight the need to have IT competence in business managers for their IT championship behavior, there are unanswered questions about the antecedents of business manager s knowledge about technology, applications, systems development, and access to Knowledge. Building on the above analysis, by using cloud computing as the technological context and small and medium enterprises as the organizational context, we probe the role of absorptive capacity in fostering IT competence and whether IT Competence mediates the relationship between an organization s knowledge absorptive capacity and its intention to adopt complex IT Innovations like cloud computing. This study aims to improve our understanding of information technology adoption in general and cloud computing adoption in particular at organizations by using absorptive capacity and IT competence as a predictor, unlike other studies which use various other models to study such adoption behavior. This study also aims to strengthen our understanding of the mediating role being played by the business manager s IT competence in such information technology adoption behavior by organizations.