Abstract

Companies invest large amounts of money in new technologies. Not surprisingly, much of the research carried out in relation to IT-investments has focused on the adoption of new technology and the related implementation barriers such as knowledge barriers and psychosocial factors. However the process of abandoning old technologies has not been so much in focus. In this paper the analysis focuses on renewal investments where subsequent technology generations fulfil a similar application role. Taxi Stockholm is used to illustrate this long-term process where slowly evolving requirements on the dispatch function over time forces technology changes. A CCT-model is presented using Customers, Companies and Technology as factors to support the understanding of technology shifts. This model is used to express the relation between the application role and technology generations. The importance of considering not only a complete life cycle of a specific technology, but also multiple such technologies providing a long-term perspective is stressed. As the use of IT mature in companies, adopting new technologies increasingly means abandoning old technologies. By combining a business perspective (through the application role), a technology generation perspective and a technology switching perspective and finally adding the time component, an analytical expression is finally presented.

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