Start Date
16-8-2018 12:00 AM
Description
Until today, important advances have been made in understanding factors that influence the adoption of a technology. However, the literature has had a bias towards the study of individual acceptance, and we have studied little the complete dynamics of the adoption process, i.e., what happens to the users when they progress through the adoption stages of a system. More specifically, a dimension that has been little studied is to explore how users mentally represent a system and how this representation changes as they move through the adoption stages. Through a longitudinal study, we investigated how the mental models of a group of users changed while they adopted a new system. Participants in this study were the owner and employees of a small Chilean restaurant. Our results confirm that users build mental representations of a system, and these representations change while they progress in the adoption process. The most important triggers of these changes were the information of other users and the influence they exerted on each other. This research contributes to the study of information systems, because it provides a novel theoretical perspective to analyze adoption. Future works can advance in investigating the use of cognitive maps or incorporating other approaches. In this paper, we present the results of the case of the restaurant's owner.
Recommended Citation
Cataldo, Alejandro; Farias, Gustavo; and Gonzalez, Cristobal, "Dynamics of the IT adoption: exploring changes in the cognitive models of a user" (2018). AMCIS 2018 Proceedings. 14.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2018/LACAIS/Presentations/14
Dynamics of the IT adoption: exploring changes in the cognitive models of a user
Until today, important advances have been made in understanding factors that influence the adoption of a technology. However, the literature has had a bias towards the study of individual acceptance, and we have studied little the complete dynamics of the adoption process, i.e., what happens to the users when they progress through the adoption stages of a system. More specifically, a dimension that has been little studied is to explore how users mentally represent a system and how this representation changes as they move through the adoption stages. Through a longitudinal study, we investigated how the mental models of a group of users changed while they adopted a new system. Participants in this study were the owner and employees of a small Chilean restaurant. Our results confirm that users build mental representations of a system, and these representations change while they progress in the adoption process. The most important triggers of these changes were the information of other users and the influence they exerted on each other. This research contributes to the study of information systems, because it provides a novel theoretical perspective to analyze adoption. Future works can advance in investigating the use of cognitive maps or incorporating other approaches. In this paper, we present the results of the case of the restaurant's owner.