Research On The Assimilation Of Complex Information Technologies In Organizations: From The Knowledge Perspective

In spite of the strategic importance of keeping pace with technological advances, the ability of most enterprises to assimilate information technology lags far behind their thirstiness for the information technology. The assimilation gap has made a waste of the investigations and damage to the confidence of further adoption of information technologies. Enhancement of the assimilation abilities needs a thorough understanding about the information technology assimilation process in organizations. Based on the classic innovation diffusion theory, traditional literatures focused their researches on explicit factors, such as technological charactetristics, organizational characteristics and environmental characteristics. The ignorance of the endogenetic factors has made their results lack generalization. From the Knowledge-based View of the firm perspective, this research provides an investigation on the role of such factors as IT related knowledge stock and absorptive capacity on the assimilation of complex information technologies. The research also makes a deep investigation on the assimilation process from the knowledge and organizational learning perspective. Results will have great implications for the assimilation of complex information technologies.Based on an explicit explanation of the differentiations between simple information technologies and complex information technologies, the research emphasizes the importance of the endogenetic factors and whole process investigation on the complex information technologies assimilation research. From the perspective of the Knowledge-based View of the firm, the research analyzes the six phases in the assimilation process and indicates the essential role of the knowledge stocks and absorptive capacities. A discussion between the IT related knowledge and sustained competitive advantages is also presented in this section.Employing survey method, the research makes a confirmatory study on the variances model of information technologies assimilation. Results indicate that the IT related knowledge stock and absorptive capacity truly have significant positive influence on technologies assimilation. These two factors can explain 56% variances of the assimilation process. In the construction of these two factors, the factural knowledge, implementation knowledge, IT-related integration ability have siginificanted positiveinfluence on the assimilation process. Other factors such as evaluation knowledge, IT-scan ability, the common language between IT and business have no siginificant influence on the assimilation process. The knowledge stock and its three dimensions also have siginificant influence on the absorptive capacity.The research makes a thorough investigation on the assimilation process with a multi-case method from the knowledge and organizational learning perspective. The research identifies the technology-related knowledge barriers and the business process-related knowledge barriers and describes the overcome mechnisms with muti-case methodology. Practical and acedemical implementations are presented in the end.