گسترش استفاده از تکنولوژی به محیط کار : نقش درک سازگاری کار در اجرای برنامه ریزی منابع سازمانی (ERP)

Spanning over three decades and hundreds of studies, researchers have generated models, that examined user perceptions of technological attributes presumed to influence intention to use IT and consequent usage behavior. While these theories have provided reasonable explanations of IT usage across a broad range of technological and task settings, they did not address the role of IT in organizations, though they have been tested in organizational contexts, the models have not been modified to fit the context of organizational work. Current models are good at explaining IT usage in personal-settings, but they have not adequately examined the role of IT in organizations and thus have limited explanatory power in such settings. Furthermore, organizations deploy IT both to maximize its usage and to derive performance benefits from it. However, current IT usage models generally only consider IT usage as the dependent variable, without examining its performance impact. We extended IT usage models to include the role of IT's perceived work compatibility in shaping users’ IT usage intention, usage, and performance in work settings. The model was empirically validated using a field survey of 138 users of ERP systems in 62 firms in China.

Firms spend millions of dollars on IT implementation initiatives, such as ERP, workflow, and knowledge management (KM) systems, expecting significant operational or performance gains from them. The worldwide market for ERP software licensing, implementation, and maintenance was $28.8 billion in 2006, and the number was projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 11% until 2011 [4]. However, many large IT system projects fail due to poor response to the implementation by the organization's users and inability to realize expected benefits. It is therefore important to understand why many organizational IT systems are not enthusiastically accepted by users, and how IT usage could translate into tangible benefits. We believed that it was important to contextualize IT usage within work settings in order to maximize its power in organizations. This should provide organizational managers with a broader set of options to increase IT usage within their organizations and assess the impact of such usage on outcomes (such as productivity or performance gains). Our objective was therefore to extend IT usage models to (1) incorporate the role and impact of organizational work, and (2) assess the impact of IT usage on organizational outcomes. Toward these ends, we synthesized prior IT usage research with task–technology fit (TTF) to postulate relationships linking the work context to IT usage, and then, to link IT usage back to individual performance in organizations. The hypothesized model was empirically tested using data collected from a survey of 138 ERP users in 62 firms across ten provinces in China and analyzed using PLS.

We proposed and validated a model of organizational IT usage, by integrating TPB with TPC, in an attempt to extend contemporary IT usage theories to organizational settings. We employed PWC (a dimension of TTF) as a theoretical construct that contextualizes the role of IT in organizational work, and hypothesized its associations with IT usage, the performance outcomes of such usage, and other user perceptions driving usage. Our proposed model captured the role of organizational work on IT usage (via PWC) as well as the corresponding effect of IT usage on organizational outcomes (via individual performance), and was empirically validated using a field survey of 138 users of ERP systems in China.